The Schizoid Mode of Being and the Space-Time Continuum (Before Metaphor)

Abstract

Henri Rey was born on the island of Mauritius and worked for many years at the Maudsley Hospital in London. He coined the term ‘claustro-agoraphobic dilemma’, which gave the title to this book. In his work with severely disturbed schizoid and borderline patients (Rey 1994), he discovered that many of them could tolerate neither intimacy nor separateness. They lacked a stable sense of identity and therefore tried to enter an external object like a shell or an exoskeleton. Inside the object, they often felt encaged and imprisoned. Outside, they felt abandoned or feared falling apart. More than any other psychoanalyst after Sigmund Freud, Henri Rey was interested in the spatial dimension of the human mind. He linked Melanie Klein's ideas about unconscious phantasy and the two ‘positions’ with Jean Piaget's research on the development of early ‘sensori-motor schemas’. In his view, biological and psychological births do not coincide since the infant, like the newborn kangaroo in his pouch, lives for a while inside the mother's mental space before he can develop his own mental space and differentiate it from the external world and the internal space of others. Rey received impulses from the work of Joan Rivière, Herbert Rosenfeld, and Hanna Segal (see Steiner 1994). He was also interested in mathematics and psycholinguistics and observed that schizoid patients often used words in a concrete way like ‘things’ or ‘acts’. This connects to another important focus of Rey's work: the difficulty of schizoid patients to symbolize and repair the damaged figures in their internal world (Rey 1984, 1988). Rey's discoveries continue to be further explored and expanded by analysts like John Steiner (see Chapter 8 in this book) and other psychoanalytic writers.