Defenses against goodness

This paper examines the fantasies and conflicts of analysands who avoid the experience and expression of positive reactions to the goodness of others and who hide feelings that would elicit that goodness. Envious wishes to soil good objects, attachments to bad objects, defenses against gratitude and dependence, negative therapeutic reactions, and other such conflictual developments can help forestall depressive anxiety in these analysands. They dread abandoning narcissistic, omnipotent, sadomasochistic, and persecutory paranoid-schizoid positions, and fear moving toward the mature depressive position, with its burdens of seemingly intolerable guilt, concern, felt ambivalence, and vulnerability to humiliation and disappointment.