Hypochondriacal fear of breast cancer – a failure of the dual maternal functions: “mother-of-the-infant” and “censorship of the lover”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fain’s theoretical conceptualisation of the ‘Censorship of the Lover’ (1971) offers a framework to investigate the unrepresented traumatic aspects of the hypochondriacal fear of breast cancer. The failure of the maternal role to function as both the mother-of-the-infant and the lover-of-the-father creates considerable deficits in the primal psychosomatic tie. The authors aim to draw attention on to the importance of the mother-of-the-infant facet of the dual maternal function. The threatening repetitive scenario experienced by the hypochondriacal patient is considered as a form of pathological autoerotism, indicating an insufficient construction of psychic bisexuality, and, subsequently, of sexual identity. The hypochondriacal fear of breast cancer constitutes a positive hallucination whereas the denial of the healthy breast represents a negative hallucination (Green, 1993). The topos of the body onto which the fear of death is projected implies the existence of underlying associations related to the subject’s history. The complexities surrounding such acute hypochondriacal anxieties are demonstrated in the analysis of a female patient, during which the analytic dyad was called upon to disclose and construct different levels of meaning in order to enhance the capacity for mentalization.