The unenviable offspring of such mothers never experience the “empathic merger with the self-object’s mature psychic organization,” which would permit them to endure the “optimum (non-traumatic, phase-appropriate) failures of the self-object [that] lead, under normal circumstances, to structure building via transmuting internalization.” Like Winnicott’s “false-self” patients, these patients develop a shoddy armor (of a “defensive” or “compensatory” character) around their maimed inner core. During analysis, the rage and despair of the “archaic self” are reactivated and, if responded to with
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