"The Dead Mother": Delusion of Persecution, Negative Hallucination, and the Origins of the Screen Figure in the Clinic of Paranoia.

Abstract

In order to study the relation between hallucination and persecutory delusion, this article takes André Green's dead mother complex as its theoretical framework. The authors argue that the attention to the negative hallucination of the dead mother, preceding the emergence of delusion, allows for a better grasp of the distribution of primary identifications in the clinic of paranoia. They examine the entanglement of maternal and paternal identifications in the context of disharmonious infantile development, triggered by the infant's libidinal disinvestment from the primary object caused by maternal depression and bereavement. This analytic approach enables clinicians to address more fully an object without percept in the patient's psyche, to which the treatment must give new life.