PSYCHOTIC PART OF THE PERSONALITY

Clinical discoveries made in work with psychotic patients enabled Wilfred R. Bion to formulate a set of highly original hypotheses about psychosis. He states these in a classic paper "Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities" (1957). His hypotheses are that the psychotic part of the personality arises from "a minute splitting of all that part of the personality that is concerned with awareness of internal and external reality, and the expulsion of these fragments so that they enter into or engulf their objects."

In this way the psychotic personality constructs a universe of bizarre objects in which he is unable to think and suffers existence in a state of hallucinosis. The psychic preconditions in the psychotic personality are: a preponderance of destructive impulses, a hatred of internal and external reality, and the dread of immanent annihilation, all of which lead to the precipitate formation of thin object relations tenaciously held.

The psychotic personality develops "in a manner markedly different" from the neurotic personality. In the same paper Bion continues: "The difference hinges on the fact that this combination of qualities leads to minute fragmentation of the personality, particularly of the apparatus of awareness of reality which Freud described as coming into operation at the behest of the reality principle, and excessive projection of these fragments of personality into external objects." Because of the destructive attacks on his ego and on any thought that could serve as a link between two objects, and, in addition, the bizarre nature of his world, he feels unable to restore either himself or his objects.

In the psychotic personality projective identification, the primitive defense mechanism discovered by Melanie Klein (1946), is not merely excessive, but has also a different role in that it becomes the predominant psychic operation: It replaces the processes of introjection and regression, and the structuring of the mind performed by repression in the neurotic personality.

In Bion's view, contact with reality, at least in those patients who are able to attend for analysis, is never entirely lost. He considers it is important clinically to find the neurotic personality which is concealed by the psychotic personality, and also to find the psychotic personality, which exists in everyone.

Edna O'Shaughnessy

See also: Bleger, José; Fragmentation; Disintegration, feelings of (anxieties); Hallucinosis; Learning from experience; Linking, attacks on; Psychotic panic.

Bibliography

Bion, Wilfred R. (1957). Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 38 (3-4), 266-275.

Klein, Melanie (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99-110; reprinted 1952 in Klein, Melanie, Heimann, Paula, Isaacs, Susan, and Riviere, Joan (Eds.), Developments in Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth; reprinted 1975 in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 3, 1946-1963. London: Hogarth.