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Or at the “castration anxiety” end, when the nourishing breakthrough of the difference between the sexes appears; − or again as “anxiety aroused by the feminine sphere”. 4 2. Anxiety concerning invasion (“di porre”) In Freud’s original theory, anxiety was the signal that instinctual elements have entered the ego. 5 After 1920, Freud’s postulate was that the libido could never reach beyond the integrative capacities of the ego (unless it happens to be libido interwoven with the death instinct), hence the projection of the great quantities generating break-through on to the death drive T H E “ I N T E R N A L F O R E I G N B O DY ” 31 and external trauma.

Female bulimic patients tell us how they can give themselves the illusion of having an interior which is their own (mouth, stomach, cloaca) and from which they can derive pleasure, often secretly, by engaging in self-incorporation—mimicking the irruption that takes place inside themselves of libido and of an invading object, then triumphantly abolishing both. Nora (cf. infra, p. 83), who had had anorectic and bulimic phases in circumstances involving object loss, described a residual symptom that occurred whenever she felt increasing anxiety about being overwhelmed by her drives: she would chew on a piece of food for some time, then spit it out.

2. Through “suppression” Here, the ego rejects the instinct. The infant spits out the “bad breast” and the bad milk, and screams with distress. There is no solution in hallucinatory wish-fulfilment, nor in auto-eroticism. If the mind of the object does not have the resources to help the child bind together such great quantities of excitation, the whole development of the infant ego is threatened. Any refusal at all costs to introject the drives may engender suppressive pathological states 28 THE UNIVERSAL REFUSAL such as autism, “self-soothing” states such as anorexia or insomnia (cf.