"Symbiosis and Separation offers a very thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious phantasy and cultural phenomena.—Thomas Ogden, M.D., author of The Matrix of the Mind

"By different routes, Koenigsberg and I have lighted upon the same central springs of psychic activity. My clinical work confirms his insights and theories. Koenigsberg he carries these findings very creatively into the social science field. I was very impressed by this fascinating book." —Frances Tustin, author of Autism and Childhood Psychosis

Psychoanalysts have endlessly debated the nature of “symbiosis," speaking of a “symbiotic phase of development (see Blass and Blatt, 1996)." Of course, upon leaving the womb, symbiosis is never “actual.” Symbiosis is a fantasy: the desire to merge or fuse with another human being—or entity.

The term “merger” means “to sink or extinguish in one which is greater or superior.” This definition describes precisely the image presented as the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan (see directly below).

Mahler’s definition of symbiosis remains the best:

Hallucinatory or delusional, somatopsychic omnipotent fusion with the representation of the mother and, in particular, the delusion of a common boundary of the two actually and physically separate individuals (Mahler, 1975/2000).

Psychoanalysts are looking for love in all the wrong places. “Symbiosis” is not a “phase of development. Rather it is the primordial or primal fantasy governing our relationship to society. We imagine we are merged or fused with our entire society or culture. We imagine that our own body is "at one" with the body politic.

Hobbes’ image captures perfectly the symbiotic fantasy: the bodies of individuals are imagined to exist in a state of “somatopsychic fusion” with the King, or Sovereign. According to this fantasy, there is no separation between the human body and the gigantic body of the sovereign. This is the core of symbiotic fantasy: fusion with an omnipotent object; no separation between one's own body and the omnipotent body politic. 

Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan.

The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts the head and torso of a long-haired, mustachioed man. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes evident that the man’s torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons, crowded closely together and each looking toward the head of the composite Leviathan.