ABSTRACT

In the course of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a five-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and profound developmental delay, there came a time when my reverie experiences often included memories of Tarkovsky’s autobiographical cinematic free-verse Mirror. These reverie experiences became forms in which I was able to contain the patient’s state of nothingness associated with her undifferentiated state, and to recognise her urgent need for mirroring of her very existence. In response to these reveries, I came to think of Winnicott’s ideas on mirroring. I propose the idea that birth can be understood as a trope of the most primordial sense of mirroring, created by the link with a subjective object. I describe the ways in which failures in the caregiver’s reverie hamper the infant’s psychological birth, which relies on good-enough mirroring for him to experience himself in the caregiver’s responses to him. When this fails, what emerges is a chimeric ghost-self, a self merged with the caregiver’s trauma or loss. This chimeric ghost is a product of the distortions in the reflected image. The infant will not be able to be born as himself until he can differentiate from the ghost. In order to avoid identification with the ghost, the nature of the parental trauma needs to be understood by patient and therapist, each helping the other in this transformative experience.

摘要

在对一名患有脑瘫和严重发育迟缓的 5 岁女孩进行精神分析心理治疗的过程中，有一段时间我的遐想经历常常包括对塔可夫斯基的自传电影自由诗镜的回忆. 这些遐想的体验变成了我能够控制患者与她未分化状态相关的虚无状态的形式，并认识到她迫切需要反映她的存在。为了回应这些遐想，我想到了温尼科特关于镜像的想法。我提出的想法是，出生可以被理解为最原始的镜像感的比喻，由与主观对象的联系而产生。我描述了看护者幻想失败的方式阻碍了婴儿的心理出生，这依赖于足够好的镜像，让他在看护者对他的反应中体验自己。当这失败时，出现的是一个嵌合的幽灵自我，一个与照顾者的创伤或损失融合在一起的自我。这种嵌合幻影是反射图像失真的产物。婴儿不能像他自己一样出生，直到他能与鬼区别开来。为了避免与鬼认同，患者和治疗师需要了解父母创伤的本质，在这种变革性的体验中互相帮助。