Pathways of pleasure

This article describes a mode of transference relationship in which the analysand has to contend with a psychic mobilisation that results from exchanges with the analyst-object and is related to the activation of pleasure in his/her own mental functioning. The patient's ego feels the internal and external excitations that stem from this mobilisation to be dangerous because of the anxieties about threatening intrusions that they raise. These anxieties arise along the contours of narcissistic flaws that give resonance to early traumatic experiences. The ego protects itself from the danger by organising narcissistic defences that oppose the impulses towards the analyst-object and foster a stagnation of the psychic work. The author puts forward the hypothesis that the patient's ego, not tolerating exposure to drive-related dangers, retracts into a mode of primary anality that is imprisoning and restrictive, setting up a fantasy of narcissistic nidification in which a part of the ego merges with an omnipotent primary object. The purpose of this strategy is to neutralise the excitations - as far as possible - while nevertheless maintaining the element of the drive excitation that forms the basis of the fantasy. The dynamics and the economy of the defensive organisation are examined in detail, as are the questions that these raise. A clinical case illustration is presented.