Psychoanalytic Observations on the Effect of Lithium on Manic Attacks

Abstract

This paper describes a predictable relation between our manic-depressive patients' blood lithium levels and particular changes in their conscious and unconscious mental processes (i.e., their thoughts, wishes, fantasies, inclinations, and feelings). These changes were, in turn, predictively related to specific changes in these patients' overt manic symptomatology. Because each of our patients' manic episodes was heralded by a marked increase in unconscious or conscious phallic sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and because this increase preceded any observed deterioration in ego or superego functioning, we hypothesize that a primary increase in our patients' phallic instinctual drives secondarily overwhelmed the capacity of their egos to defend against these drives, and that this, in turn, resulted in the development of our patients' overt manic symptoms. Psychoanalysis (or psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy) made our patients consciously aware both of their previously unconscious phallic sexual thoughts and impulses, and of their defenses against them. This new awareness enabled our patients to recognize when their, now conscious, phallic sexual impulses and thoughts became inappropriately intensified; and this, in turn, permitted them to avoid overt manic episodes by counteracting these inappropriate inclinations with increased doses of lithium.

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