Concept
Claustrum
Meltzer's term, in The Claustrum (1992), for the inner world entered by intrusive identification: the inside of the internal mother experienced as a place where part of the self lives. It has three compartments with their own atmospheres: the head-breast, a place of privileged knowledge that becomes one of smug omniscience; the genital, a place of erotic excitement that turns into a world of sexual obsession; and the rectum, a world of tyranny, sadism and survival at any price. Life in the claustrum brings claustrophobic dread and the fear of expulsion, cuts the person off from real development and intimacy, and underlies many narcissistic, perverse and psychotic states.
Development
1992
Donald Meltzer introduced by
In The Claustrum Meltzer maps the inside of the internal mother entered by intrusive identification: head-breast, genital and rectal compartments, each with its own claustrophobic world.
Relations
- 1992 introduced by Donald Meltzer
In The Claustrum Meltzer maps the inside of the internal mother entered by intrusive identification: head-breast, genital and rectal compartments, each with its own claustrophobic world.
- derives from Intrusive identification
The claustrum is the inner space that intrusive identification creates: the part of the self that has forced its way into the internal mother lives there, trapped in the claustrophobic world of the compartment it entered.
Works
- 1992
The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena
Meltzer distinguishes intrusive identification, an omnipotent phantasy of forcing one's way into the internal mother to possess her qualities, from the communicative projective identification that Bion described. He maps the inner world that intrusion creates: the claustrum, divided into the compartments of the head-breast, the genital and the rectum, each with its own atmosphere, in which the intruder lives in claustrophobic dread of expulsion. He traces the claustrum's part in narcissism, perversion and addiction, psychosis and the onset of schizophrenia, adolescence and politics, and the technical problems of reaching patients who live inside it. The book closes with an essay by Meg Harris Williams on Macbeth. Its publisher presents it as a companion to The Apprehension of Beauty, and Rebeca Grinberg noted that it calls the identification intrusive, a matter of quality, rather than massive, a matter of quantity.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena1992 Evidence for a relation