Magic Transformation and Tragic Transformation—Splitting of Ego and Superego in Severely Traumatized Patients

Abstract

Our fairy tales and myths, our dreams and fantasies, live from the wishes that we could magically change ourselves and the world we live in. In almost every hour of our psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic work we meet this hope for magical transformation that our patients set in various objects in the outside: in drugs, or our presence, or in the symbiotic union with others, in money, in gambling, television, success, food and especially also in sexual gratification or religious ritual. Such magical transformation is contrasted by what George Eliot called “tragic transformation.” The term refers to a process of profound inner change brought about by suffering, i.e., trauma, through massive inner conflict, through insight and through action or active work, in behalf of somebody else, or in the service of a great cause. In the case described in detail, the magical transformation occurs with the establishment of several versions of double reality and double identity, as a way of dealing with extreme traumatization (killing of the mother by the father, the probable participation of the latter in the Holocaust, severe physical abuse). In the psychoanalysis, particular attention was being paid to conflicts within the superego. The gradual shift during therapy as a form of tragic transformation is being described.