the novel. Especially for Pecola's parents, the defensive splitting and dissociation of the

self, which originally help them cope with painful and frustrating life experiences, later

make them "fated," in Christopher Bollas's term, to lead a highly reactive life, preventing

them from actualizing their unique potentials, or what Bollas calls "idioms," through

conscious choices and uses of objects.78

 Pecola's prayer for blue eyes is the epitome of internalized racial self-loathing.

But I also interpret it as her desperate reparative attempt to forge a new self untouched by

trauma and to rescript her traumatic, incomprehensible experience so that she can make

sense of it and maintain faltering object relationships with her significant others by taking

the blame upon herself for their unforgivable acts. Her prayer for blue eyes and her final

retreat into schizophrenia are caused by the incestuous rape by her father Cholly and the

cruel abandonment by her physically and emotionally abusive mother Pauline, who fails

to provide her with the badly needed protection that is vital for some measure of

restitution of her shattered self after the awful incident. Pecola responds to these

traumatizing betrayals by completely withdrawing into her self-centered, subjective

reality and forsaking reality testing to avoid overwhelming painful disintegration anxiety.

Her fractured, schizophrenic psyche, expressed in a deranged dialogue with her

imaginary friend, exemplifies the common defense mechanisms of splitting and

dissociation often found in trauma victims. A more detailed examination and an

additional contextualization of her self-experiences within her familial and societal

setting, however, are needed in order to understand her trauma and dissociation.

 The Failure of Selfobjects and Deformation of Love

 If the self, as Stephen Mitchell and contemporary relational psychoanalysts argue,

is defined "not as a conglomeration of physically based urges but as being shaped by and