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.The ensuing inner chaos and despair is unconsciously phantasied in terms akin to aninferno:  I came to myself within a dark wood& savage and harsh and dense. If this stateof mind is not surmounted, hate and death must be denied, pushed aside, warded off,rejected.They are replaced by unconscious phantasies of omnipotence, magicimmortality, religious mysticism, the counterpart of infant phantasies of beingindestructible and under the protective care of some idealized and bountiful figure.A person who reaches mid-life, either without having successfully established himselfin marital and occupational life, or having established himself by means of manic activityand denial with consequent emotional impoverishment, is badly prepared for meeting thedemands of middle age, and getting enjoyment out of his maturity.In such cases, themid-life crisis, and the adult encounter with the conception of life to be lived in thesetting of an approaching personal death, will likely be experienced as a period ofpsychological disturbance and depressive breakdown.Or breakdown may be avoided bymeans of a strengthening of manic defences, with a warding off of depression andpersecution about ageing and death, but with an accumulation of persecutory anxiety tobe faced when the inevitability of ageing and death eventually demands recognition.The compulsive attempts, in many men and women reaching middle age, to remainyoung, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexualpromiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuineenjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern, are familiar patterns.They areattempts at a race against time.And in addition to the impoverishment of emotional lifecontained in the foregoing activities, real character deterioration is always possible.Retreat from psychic reality encourages intellectual dishonesty, and a weakening ofmoral fibre and of courage.Increase in arrogance, and ruthlessness concealing pangs ofenvy or self-effacing humbleness and weakness concealing phantasies ofomnipotence are symptomatic of such change.These defensive phantasies are equally as persecuting, however, as the chaotic andhopeless internal situation they are meant to mitigate.They lead to attempts at easysuccess, at a continuation on a false note of the early adult lyricism and precipitatecreation that is, creation which, by avoiding contemplation, now seeks not to expressMelanie Klein today 202but to avoid contact with the infantile experience of hate and of death.Instead of creativeenhancement by the introduction of the genuinely tragic, there is emotionalimpoverishment a recoil away from creative development.As Freud incisivelyremarked:  Life loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game, life itself, may notbe risked. Here is the Achilles heel of much young genius.Working through the depressive positionWhen, by contrast, the prevailing balance between love and hate is on the side of love,there is instinctual fusion, in which hate can be mitigated by love, and the mid-lifeencounter with death and hate takes on a different hue.Revived are the deep unconsciousmemories of hate, not denied but mitigated by love; of death and destruction mitigated byreparation and the will to live; of good things injured and damaged by hate, revived againand healed by loving grief; of spoiling envy mitigated by admiration and by gratitude; ofconfidence and hope, not through denial, but through the deep inner sense that thetorment of grief and loss, of guilt and persecution, can be endured and overcome if facedby loving reparation.Under constructive circumstances, the created object in mid-life is experiencedunconsciously in terms of the good breast which would in Bion s (1962) termsmoderate the fear component in the fear of dying that had been projected into itand the infant in due course would re-introject a now tolerable and consequentlygrowth stimulating part of its personality.In the sculpting mode of work the externally created object, instead of being experiencedas having impoverished the personality, is unconsciously re-introjected, and stimulatesfurther unconscious creativeness.The created object is experienced as life-giving [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]