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

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

Mahler’s original 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 in all the wrong places. “Symbiosis” is not simply a “phase of development. Rather it is the primordial or primal fantasy that shapes or governs our relationship to society and others throughout our lifetimes. 

Hobbes’ image (below) perfectly captures the fantasy of symbiosis: the bodies of individual are imagined existing in a state of “somatopsychic fusion.” There is no separation between the human body and the gigantic body of the sovereign. This is the core of symbiotic fantasy: no separation; fusion with an object conceived as omnipotent.

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.