Repeated exposure to traumatic anxiety forecloses the transitional space, kills the symbolic activity of creative imagination, and replaces it with what Winnicott calls "fantasying" (Winnicott 1971). Fantasying is a dissociated state, which is neither imagination nor living in external reality, but a kind of melancholic self-soothing compromise which goes on forever - a defensive use of the imagination in the service of anxiety avoidance . . . this self-soothing really amounts to a self-hypnotic spell - an unconscious undertow into non-differentiation to escape conscious feeling. Here a retreat into 'oneness' replaces the hard work of separation necessary for 'wholeness.' This is not regression as we like to think of it in the service of the ego, but "malignant regression" -- regression which suspends a part of her in an auto-hypnotic twilight state in order (so her diabolical figure thinks) to assure the survival of herself as a human person."
The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched 1996
