Thomas H Ogden Creative Readings Essays On Seminal Analytic Works

Creative Readings
Thomas Ogden is internationally recognized as one of the most creative

analytic thinkers writing today. In this book he brings his original analytic
ideas to life by means of his own method of closely reading major analytic
works. He reads watershed papers in a way that does not simply cast new
and discerning light on the works he is discussing, but introduces his own
thinking regarding the ideas being discussed in the texts.
Ogden offers expanded understandings of some of the most fundamental
concepts constituting psychoanalytic theory and practice. He does so by
finding in each of the articles he discusses much that the author knew, but
did not know that he or she knew. An example of this is how Freud, in his
conception of the unconscious workings of mourning and melancholia,
was providing the foundation of a theory of unconscious internal object
relations. Ogden goes on to provide further re-readings of classic material
from the following key contributors to contemporary psychoanalysis:
• W. R. D. Fairbairn
• Donald Winnicott
• Wilfred Bion
• Hans Loewald
• Harold Searles.
This book is not simply a book of readings, it is a book about reading, about
how to read in a way that readers actively rewrite what they are reading,
and in so doing make the ideas truly their own. The concepts that Ogden
develops in his readings provide a significant step in the reader’s expansion
of his or her understanding of many of the ideas that lie at the cutting edge
of contemporary psychoanalysis. Creative Readings will be of particular
interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who use a psychodynamic
approach, as well as professionals and academics with an interest in contem-
porary psychoanalysis.
Thomas H. Ogden is a supervising and personal analyst at the

Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He has published eight
books, including Rediscovering Psychoanalysis and This Art of Psychoanalysis.
He was awarded the 2004 International Journal of Psychoanalysis Award for the
Most Important Paper of the Year and the 2010 Haskell Norman Prize –
an international award for “outstanding achievement as a psychoanalytic
clinician, teacher and theoretician”.
THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
General Editor: Alessandra Lemma
The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association with

the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London. It took over from the International
Psychoanalytical Library which published many of the early translations of the
works of Freud and the writings of most of the leading British and Continental
psychoanalysts.
The purpose of the New Library of Psychoanalysis is to facilitate a greater
and more widespread appreciation of psychoanalysis and to provide a forum for
increasing mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in
other disciplines such as the social sciences, medicine, philosophy, history,
linguistics, literature and the arts. It aims to represent different trends both in
British psychoanalysis and in psychoanalysis generally. The New Library of
Psychoanalysis is well placed to make available to the English-speaking world
psychoanalytic writings from other European countries and to increase the
interchange of ideas between British and American psychoanalysts. Through
the Teaching Series, the New Library of Psychoanalysis now also publishes
books that provide comprehensive, yet accessible, overviews of selected subject
areas aimed at those studying psychoanalysis and related fields such as the social
sciences, philosophy, literature and the arts.
The Institute, together with the British Psychoanalytical Society, runs a
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with psychoanalysis and publishes the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It
runs a training course in psychoanalysis which leads to membership of the
International Psychoanalytical Association – the body which preserves interna-
tionally agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of professional
ethics and practice for psychoanalysis as initiated and developed by Sigmund
Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute have included Michael Balint,
Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein,
John Rickman and Donald Winnicott.
Previous General Editors include Dana Birksted-Breen, David Tuckett,
Elizabeth Spillius and Susan Budd.
Current Members of the Advisory Board include Liz Allison, Giovanna di
Ceglie, Rosemary Davies and Richard Rusbridger.
Previous Members of the Advisory Board include Christopher Bollas,
Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein, Donald Campbell, Sara Flanders, Stephen
Grosz, John Keene, Eglé Laufer, Alessandra Lemma, Juliet Mitchell, Michael
Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg, Mary Target and David Taylor.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahony
The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men Marion Milner
The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith
Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte-Blanco
The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik
Melanie Klein Today: Volume 1, Mainly Theory Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Melanie Klein Today: Volume 2, Mainly Practice Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph Edited by
Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius
About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942–80 Paula
Heimann. Edited by Margret Tonnesmann
The Freud–Klein Controversies 1941–45 Edited by Pearl King and Riccardo
Steiner
Dream, Phantasy and Art Hanna Segal
Psychic Experience and Problems of Technique Harold Stewart
Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion Edited by Robin Anderson
From Fetus to Child Alessandra Piontelli
A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience: Conceptual and Clinical Reflections
E. Gaddini. Edited by Adam Limentani
The Dream Discourse Today Edited and introduced by Sara Flanders
The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Feminitity and
Masculinity Edited and introduced by Dana Birksted-Breen
Psychic Retreats John Steiner
The Taming of Solitude: Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
Unconscious Logic: An Introduction to Matte-Blanco’s Bi-logic and its Uses Eric Rayner
Understanding Mental Objects Meir Perlow
Life, Sex and Death: Selected Writings of William Gillespie Edited and introduced
by Michael Sinason
What Do Psychoanalysts Want? The Problem of Aims in Psychoanalytic Therapy
Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher
Michael Balint: Object Relations, Pure and Applied Harold Stewart
Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States Anna Potamianou
Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972–1995 Hanna Segal
Emotional Vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure Danielle Quinodoz
Early Freud and Late Freud Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
A History of Child Psychoanalysis Claudine and Pierre Geissmann
Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis Ronald Britton
A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object Robert A. Caper
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide Edited by Rosine Jozef
Perelberg
On Bearing Unbearable States of Mind Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm. Edited by
Priscilla Roth
Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work of Joseph Sandler Edited by Peter Fonagy,
Arnold M. Cooper and Robert S. Wallerstein
The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green Edited by Gregorio Kohon
The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse André Green
The Bi-Personal Field: Experiences of Child Analysis Antonino Ferro
The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in
Psychoanalysis Michael Parsons
Ordinary People, Extra-ordinary Protections: A Post-Kleinian Approach to the
Treatment of Primitive Mental States Judith Mitrani
The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement Piera Aulagnier
The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-Evaluation Judith Trowell and
Alicia Etchegoyen
Dreams That Turn Over a Page: Paradoxical Dreams in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema
Edited and introduced by Andrea Sabbadini
In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop Edited by Edith
Hargreaves and Arturo Varchevker
The Quiet Revolution in American Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of Arnold M.
Cooper Arnold M. Cooper. Edited and introduced by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss
Seeds of Illness and Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the Role of
Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro
The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation César
Botella and Sára Botella
Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the
Unconscious André Green
The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between Generations
Haydée Faimberg
Glacial Times: A Journey Through the World of Madness Salomon Resnik
This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries
Thomas H. Ogden
Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling Antonino Ferro
Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators?
Edited by David M. Black
Recovery of the Lost Good Object Eric Brenman. Edited and introduced by
Gigliola Fornari Spoto
The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis Roger Kennedy
Feeling the Words: Neuropsychoanalytic Understanding of Memory and the Unconscious
Mauro Mancia
Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in
European Cinema Edited by Andrea Sabbadini
Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius Elizabeth
Spillius. Edited by Priscilla Roth and Richard Rusbridger
Constructions and the Analytic Field: History, Scenes and Destiny Domenico Chianese
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Hanna Segal. Edited by Nicola Abel-Hirsch
Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable: The Evolution of a Method to Describe
and Compare Psychoanalytic Approaches David Tuckett, Roberto Basile, Dana
Birksted-Breen, Tomas Böhm, Paul Denis, Antonino Ferro, Helmut Hinz,
Arne Jemstedt, Paola Mariotti and Johan Schubert
Time, Space and Phantasy Rosine Jozef Perelberg
Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting
Thomas H. Ogden
Mind Works: Technique and Creativity in Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro
Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman
Michael Feldman. Edited by Betty Joseph
Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalysis of Children Claudia Frank. Edited
by Elizabeth Spillius
The Psychotic Wavelength: A Psychoanalytic Perspective for Psychiatry Richard Lucas
Betweenity: A Discussion of the Concept of Borderline Judy Gammelgaard
The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field Giuseppe Civitarese
Bion Today Edited by Chris Mawson
Secret Passages: The Theory and Technique of Interpsychic Relations Stefano
Bolognini
Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and
Bionian Perspectives Lawrence J. Brown
Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat John Steiner
Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions Antonino Ferro
Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept Edited by Elizabeth Spillius and
Edna O’Shaughnessy
The Maternal Lineage Edited by Paolo Mariotti
Insight: Essays on Psychoanalytic Knowing Jorge L. Ahamada
Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works Thomas H. Ogden
TITLES IN THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

TEACHING SERIES
Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings Jean-Michel

Quinodoz
Listening to Hanna Segal: Her Contribution to Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
Reading French Psychoanalysis Edited by Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flanders and
Alain Gibeault
Reading Winnicott Edited by Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce
Initiating Psychoanalysis: Perspectives Edited by Bernard Reith, Sven Lagerlöf,
Penelope Crick, Mette Møller and Elisabeth Skale
Creative Readings
Essays on Seminal Analytic Works
Thomas H. Ogden
First published 2012
by Routledge
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© Thomas H. Ogden 2012
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ogden, Thomas H.
Creative readings : essays on seminal analytic works / Thomas Ogden.
p. cm.—(New library of psychoanalysis)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-69832-0 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-415-69833-7 (paperback)
1. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.
RC506.O33 2013
616.8917—dc23
2011036755
ISBN: 978-0-415-69832-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-69833-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-12529-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
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Paperback cover design by Sandra Heath
To my patients who, each in their
own way, have taught me what is
possible when two people put their
all into talking truthfully to one another
Contents
Acknowledgements xii
1 Some thoughts on how to read this book 1
2 Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” and the

origins of object relations theory 11
3 Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised

theory of thinking 34
4 Why read Fairbairn? 55
5 Winnicott’s “Primitive emotional development” 76
6 Reading Bion 97
7 Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical seminars 117
8 Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived 138
9 Harold Searles’ “Oedipal love in the

countertransference” and “Unconscious identification” 157
References 178
Index 186
xi
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for

permission to use the following papers in this volume:
A new reading of the origins of object-relations theory. International

Journal of Psychoanalysis 83: 767–782, 2002. Copyright The Institute
of Psychoanalysis.
An introduction to the reading of Bion. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 85: 285–300, 2004. Copyright The Institute of
Psychoanalysis.
Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 87: 651–666, 2006. Copyright The Institute of
Psychoanalysis.
Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical seminars. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88: 1185–1200, 2007. Copyright The
Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Reading Harold Searles. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88:
353–369, 2007. Copyright The Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Why read Fairbairn? International Journal of Psychoanalysis 91:
101–118, 2010. Copyright The Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised theory of
thinking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92: 925–942, 2011.
Copyright The Institute of Psychoanalysis.
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly has kindly granted permission to use the

following article in this volume:
Reading Winnicott. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 70: 299–323, 2001.
Copyright the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
xii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marta Schneider Brody for her perceptive

editorial comments on many of the chapters of this volume. I am also
grateful to Gina Atkinson and Patricia Marra for the thoughtfulness
of their contributions to the production phase of the book, and to
Yoav Efrati for his two drawings (“Reading people,” 2007) that
appear on the front and back covers.
xiii
1
Some thoughts on how to read this book
This volume is the product of more than a decade of writing my

experience of reading major works by Freud, Fairbairn, Isaacs,
Winnicott, Loewald, Bion, and Searles. I attempt not to write about my
experience of reading their works, but to write my experience of reading
them: to write what I have let these papers and books do to me, what
I have done with these papers and books, and how I have rewritten
them and made them my own books and papers. I try to capture in
my writing something of the way I read in order that the reader may
learn something about the way he reads, including the way he reads
his own writing. This volume is “a reading book” – a book about
reading, about how to read – not simply a book of readings.
The experience of reading
When I am talking about a book that is important to me, I often slip

and say, “the book I wrote,” instead of, “the book I read,” and then
correct myself. I’ve heard others regularly make the same slip. I
attribute the error to the fact that when we have spent a good deal of
time with a book, we feel that we have written it or at least rewritten
it – and, in an important sense, we have. Reading is an experience in
which we do not simply “take in” the meaning of the text. In the act
of reading, we transform the black markings on the page into linguistic
structures that hold significance. But when we are reading creatively,
we do something more than that. We each produce our own personal
set of meanings and ideas using the text as a starting point: “Take the
book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never
find what I find” (Emerson, 1841, p. 87). I think of this way of
1
Creative Readings
reading – more accurately, this aspect of reading – as “transitive

reading,” a reading experience in which we are actively doing some-
thing to the text, making it our own, interpreting in a way that adds
something to the text that had not been there before we have read it.
It is also important to be able to read “intransitively” – that is, to
be able to give oneself over to the experience of reading. When
reading, I try to allow myself to be occupied and, to a certain extent,
taken over by the mind of another person, the writer, as I speak his
or her words. When I read an analytic text, for instance a work of
Melanie Klein, I “become a Kleinian” and view the world through
her eyes. In teaching Klein’s work, I ask students and colleagues to
try on for size her ideas in their entirety as they read her work, and
to do their best not to disrupt this experience of reading with such
(knee jerk) objections as, “It is impossible for a two-day-old infant to
fantasize in the way she is describing.”
Giving oneself over to the experience of reading is by no means a
detached or passive event. One is not only allowing “foreigners” (words
and sentences that are not one’s own) into oneself, one is also permit-
ting oneself to be read by that foreigner (the writing). Of course, the
writing cannot read us, but it can present us with a perspective on
ourselves from which we have never viewed ourselves, and may never
again be able not to include in the ways we view ourselves. The experi-
ence of “being read by the writing” (making use of the writing to
engage in a form of self-reflection that is unique to the experience of
reading) need not feel invasive or intrusive. On the contrary, in being
read well by what one is reading (in using the experience of reading to
read oneself), the reader may feel that he is becoming alive to a way of
being that he has always felt to comprise an essential aspect of himself or
herself, but has not known how to put into words, or how to more fully
become the person who thinks and expresses himself in that way.
Winnicott’s writing is remarkable in its power to read the reader
(see Chapter 5). Take, for example, a sentence from “Primitive
emotional development”:
It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his fingers or

mouth by too vigorously sucking his thumb or hand] the element
that something must suffer if the infant is to have pleasure: the
object of primitive love suffers by being loved, apart from being
hated.
(Winnicott, 1945, p. 155)
2
In reading this sentence, there is sadness and beauty to the language,

particularly in the words “the object of primitive love suffers by
being loved.” I have experienced the forcefulness, and even violence,
of my children’s primitive love and their primitive need for me
when they were infants – and even now that they are well into
adulthood. I, like most parents, have experienced sleep deprivation,
agonizing worry and emotional fraying as a consequence of trying to
meet their primitive love with love of my own. But, as Winnicott is
saying in this sentence (in an accepting, but unsentimental voice),
that is the nature of the beast – the nature of being the object of
primitive love.
Winnicott uses the word object in this sentence not in its usual
technical sense (i.e. as a synonym for a person in the external object
world or a figure in the internal object world), but in its everyday
sense (the object of the transitive verb love: the person on whom,
toward whom, against whom primitive love is directed). I, like most
parents, would not trade a moment of being the object of that kind
of love. More difficult for me to fully and genuinely acknowledge in
reading and being read by Winnicott are the ways in which my own
primitive love, both as a child and as an adult, has caused others –
particularly my parents, my wife, and my children – to suffer. And
that, too, is inescapably the nature of the beast.
Reading as interpreting: Adding something new
With the exception of Isaacs, all of the analysts whose work I

discuss were prolific writers. I have chosen to look closely at one or
two pieces of the writing of each author. I have selected these partic-
ular articles and books because my experience of reading and
rereading them, and of metaphorically writing and rewriting
them, has played a singularly important role in my development as a
psychoanalyst. I try to stay true to each of the texts in the sense of
accurately conveying (in part by citing the texts at some length) the
author’s ideas and the way he or she expresses them. My emphasis,
however, is not on trying to determine what Freud or Bion or
Isaacs or Loewald “really meant.” I am far more interested in what
these authors knew, but did not know they knew – in how these
texts are rich in ways their authors did not consciously intend or
understand.
3
Creative Readings
My reading (and writing) in this way will inevitably lead the reader
to ask where the author’s thinking leaves off and where mine begins.
For example, when I say in Chapter 3 that it is “implicit” in Isaacs’
(1952) “The nature and function of phantasy” that inherent to phan-
tasy is the need to discover, to get to know and understand external
reality, I mean that, for me, the language Isaacs uses strongly suggests
that idea. Did she have that in mind (consciously) when she wrote the
paper? Probably not, but I believe that the language she uses suggests
that her thinking was leading in that direction. I support that idea by
looking at her use of language in the final portion of her paper where
she states that the symbolic function of phantasy “builds a bridge from
the inner world to interest in the outer world and knowledge of phys-
ical objects and events” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 110). She goes on to say that
phantasying promotes “the development of interest in the external
world and the process of learning about it” (p. 110). And a bit later:
“The power to seek out and organize knowledge [of the external
world] is drawn [from phantasy activity]” (p. 110). It is from these
statements and others that I cite in my discussion of her paper that I
make my inferences about the way in which the need to know gives
direction to phantasy activity (which I view as synonymous with
unconscious thinking).
One might ask how you, the reader, are to decide to whom to give
credit or responsibility for the inferences I draw/create. A part of my
response to that question is: Who cares? The important thing is what
one is able to do with the ideas that Isaacs makes explicit in combina-
tion with the ideas that her language suggests. In my reading of Isaacs
I may be able to do more with aspects of the text than Isaacs was able
to because I – as is the case for every contemporary analytic reader –
have available to me perspectives derived from developments in
psychoanalysis and related fields that Isaacs did not. To my ear, her
text echoes work published decades after she wrote her paper, for
example, Chomsky’s (1957, 1968) work on the deep structure of
language, Bion’s (1962a, 1962b) work on a psychoanalytic theory of
thinking, and Winnicott’s (1974) conception of “the fear of break-
down.” In addition, and probably more important, I have a mind of
my own that is different from Isaacs’ mind, and that allows me to see
in her work a good deal that she did not see. The same is true for you,
the reader, in reading Isaacs and in reading what I write.
In the chapters that follow, I, at times, indicate that a particular
idea is my own “extension” of an author’s work, but in truth, I
4
cannot say exactly where the author’s thinking stops and mine begins.
Ideas do not come with tags naming their owner.1 For example, in
my discussion of Fairbairn’s work (Chapter 4, p. 62), I say
It seems to me that a libidinal tie to an internal object toward

whom one feels anger, resentment, and the like, necessarily
involves an (unconscious) wish/need to use what control one feels
one has to change the unloving and unaccepting (internal) object
into a loving and accepting one.
From this vantage point, I view the libidinal ego and the internal
saboteur as aspects of self that are intent on transforming the
exciting object and the rejecting object into loving objects.
In this passage, I am extending Fairbairn’s thinking about internal

object relations by stating that within the terms of the internal object
world that Fairbairn describes, it seems to me that the most impor-
tant motivating force driving the creation and maintenance of the
unconscious internal object world is the need to transform unsatisfac-
tory objects into satisfactory ones. Fairbairn, himself, never comes to
this conclusion. You, the reader, will have to judge for yourself
whether my extensions of Fairbairn’s ideas are, indeed, consistent
with Fairbairn’s thinking, and whether they enrich or detract from
his contribution. But I realize as I listen to my own words – “You,
the reader, will have to judge for yourself whether my extensions of
Fairbairn are, indeed, consistent with Fairbairn’s thinking” – that this
idea constitutes for me only a partial truth. To that perspective
must be added another equally valid point of view: you, the reader,
should feel no obligation to try to determine what is my thinking and
what is Fairbairn’s. In fact, the effort to do so is beside the point.
What is important is what you do with Fairbairn’s writing and
with mine – what you make that is neither his nor mine, but
your own.
Even if one were inclined to try to determine what is Fairbairn’s
and what is mine, the task, it seems to me, is impossible. Breuer, in
1 Just as ideas come without tags indicating who owns them, it is important that
thinkers not come with tags indicating who owns them (for example, the tags “contem-
porary Kleinian,” “contemporary Freudian,” “self-psychologist,” “relational analyst,”
and so on).
5
Creative Readings
his introduction to the theoretical section of Studies on Hysteria

(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895), eloquently comments on the prob-
lems involved in claims of originality:
When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were

first expressed by single individuals quickly become common
property. . . It is scarcely possible to be certain who first gave them
utterance, and there is always a danger of regarding as a product of
one’s own what has already been said by someone else. I hope,
therefore, that I may be excused . . . if no strict distinction is made
between what is my own and what originates elsewhere.
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186)
Borges, in the preface to his first volume of poetry, Fervor to Buenos

Aires, adds irony and wit, and an additional layer of complexity,
to the idea that no one has the right to claim a poem (or an idea) as
his own:
If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other,

may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before
him. We are all one; our inconsequential minds are much alike,
and circumstances so influence us that it is something of an acci-
dent that you are the reader and I the writer – the unsure, ardent
writer – of my verses.
(Borges, 1923, p. 269)
The irony here is that Borges, in a style of writing and thinking that
is unmistakably original to him, is dismissing the idea that anyone is
justified in claiming that his writing and thinking are strictly his own.
The idea that the author cannot claim originality for his writing is
not original to Borges, but Borges’ way of expressing that idea – and
at the same time refuting it – radically alters it, and makes it original
to him.
What one says and the way one says it
Whether or not we believe that anyone has the right to attach his or
her name to an idea or a poem or an essay or a particular form of
“word music” (Borges, quoted by Vargas Llosa, 2008, p. 32), human
6
truths must again and again be rediscovered in new forms, otherwise

those truths become clichés that staunch the flow of genuine thinking
and creativity. Renewal of thinking and originality of expression are
mutually dependent: writing is a unique form of thinking; and origi-
nality of writing is originality of thinking. Neither content nor
style exists without the other. Nevertheless, if, for a moment, we
think of content as the anatomy of writing, then style is its
physiology. Content, in the absence of style, is a lifeless corpse; style,
without content, is an insubstantial wraith. Together, style and
content comprise the living, working body of writing waiting to be
read. It is for this reason that in discussing the books and papers that
are the subject of each of the chapters of this volume, I treat writing
style and ideational content as two qualities of a single entity – one
cannot say the same thing in two different ways: to say something
differently is to say something different.
For example, in reading the following sentence from Freud’s
(1917a) “Mourning and melancholia” (see Chapter 2), it is impos-
sible to separate the ideas from the writing:
Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring

the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of
continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence [in
melancholia] loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by
disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it.
(p. 257)
The writing is dense – a great deal of thinking is occurring in the very

act of writing a few words. It could be argued that the entirety of the
central argument of this watershed paper is present either implicitly or
explicitly in this single sentence. In comparing the mental activities
that lie at the heart of mourning with those operating in melancholia,
Freud not only describes but also captures in the action of the language
what he has in mind. Freud’s belief that the aim both of mourning
and of melancholia is the same – to cope with the loss of a person to
whom one is deeply attached – is not stated as such, but is present in
the structure of the sentence: “Just as . . . so does.”
He uses animism in this sentence – a literary device that is a hall-
mark of his writing – to create an imaginary scene in which mourning
is an active agent with a life of its own that does something critical to
the self (the ego): “mourning impels the ego to give up the object by
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declaring the object to be dead.” Mourning does so by “offering the

ego the inducement of continuing to live.” This is quite a statement
(contained in a single clause): entering the process of mourning
involves an unconscious choice to continue to be emotionally alive
in a world marred by the absence of the person one loves. The expe-
rience of mourning is in itself a form of “continuing to live” –
mourning is living in a world devoid of the person one loves. Not to
mourn is to allow an aspect of oneself to die emotionally in order to
avoid the pain of living without the person one loves.
In the second half of this sentence, Freud begins by naming the
essential similarity and the essential difference between the mourner
and the melancholic: “so does [the melancholic in] each single struggle
of ambivalence loosen the fixation of the libido to the object.” In other
words, the melancholic, like the mourner, is faced by the prospect of
experiencing the pain of attachment to an absent object. Also like the
mourner, the melancholic, in “each single struggle of ambivalence” – a
phrase that captures the anguish experienced by the melancholic as he
wrestles with himself – tries (in vain) to “loosen” his tie to the object.
The difference between the mourner and the melancholic lies in the
fact that the melancholic is unable to face a life devoid of the lost person
on whom his libido is “fixated”; consequently, he unconsciously opts
not for life (“continuing to live”), but for a substitute for living in the
form of the satisfaction entailed in unceasing rage at the absent loved
object. This feeling state sustains the illusion (the unconscious psychic
reality) that the absent person is still alive and capable of perceiving and
feeling the melancholic’s agony and his sense of having been profoundly
wronged. The melancholic never tires of “disparaging, denigrating and
even as it were killing it” (the lost, but psychically present object).
What a masterful final phrase: “even as it were killing it.” The melan-
cholic does not kill the object, he only “as it were” kills it – the melan-
cholic has it both ways: he kills the object (and in so doing, psychically
takes control of a situation in which he feels powerless), and he does
not “really” kill it (even in his own mind, especially in his own mind)
because he needs to keep the object alive psychically so that it may
witness his ceaseless raging at it and disparaging of it.
Part of what is distinctive to Freud in this remarkable sentence is
the way in which the writing is alive with daring, but not reckless,
conjecture compacted into a very few carefully chosen words, phrases
and clauses. The writing has the quality of a tightly wound spring: it
is subtly explosive.
8
To study Freud’s writing is to study his thinking, and to study his

thinking is to study his writing. The same is true – each in its own
way – of all of the other authors whose work I discuss in this volume.
In each of the sentences that follow there is an original way of
thinking that is inseparable from a distinctive way of writing.
Who but Isaacs could have captured in a single sentence the ubiq-
uity of phantasy in unconscious psychological life:
All impulses, all feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in

phantasies which give them mental life and show their direction
and purpose.
(Isaacs, 1952, p. 99)
Who but Fairbairn could have named and responded to the core
of Isaacs’ thinking in such cogent, diametrically opposing terms as
these:
I cannot refrain from voicing the opinion that the explanatory

concept of ‘phantasy’ has been rendered obsolete by the concepts
of ‘psychical reality’ and ‘internal objects’ . . . These internal objects
should be regarded as having an organized structure, an identity of
their own, an endopsychic existence, and an activity as real within
the inner world as those of any objects in the outer world.
(Fairbairn, 1943a, p. 359)
Who but Winnicott could have refused to adopt either Isaacs’ or

Fairbairn’s or anybody else’s language and ideas, and developed an
altogether different form of writing and thinking that can be clearly
heard in the following sentences:
An example of unintegration phenomena is provided by the very

common experience of the patient who proceeds to give every
detail of the week-end and feels contented at the end if everything
has been said, though the analyst feels that no analytic work has
been done . . . To be known means to feel integrated at least in the
person of the analyst. This is the ordinary stuff of infant life, and an
infant who has had no one person to gather his bits together starts
with a handicap in his own self-integrating task . . . There are long
stretches of time in a normal infant’s life in which a baby does not
mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or whether he
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lives in his mother’s face or in his own body, provided that from
time to time he comes together and feels something.
(Winnicott, 1945, p. 150)
Who but Searles could have invented a style of writing that is as

shockingly honest as the analytic experience itself:
while we [he and his hospitalized schizophrenic patient] were

sitting in silence and a radio not far away was playing a tenderly
romantic song . . . I realized that this man was dearer to me than
anyone else in the world, including my wife.
(Searles, 1959, p. 294)
Who but Bion could have introduced a set of revolutionary

analytic ideas in sentences as simple and enigmatic as these:
the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake
up. Hence the peculiar condition seen clinically when a psychotic
patient behaves as if he were in precisely this state.
(Bion, 1962a, p. 8)
And, who but Loewald could have written a sentence as profound

and disturbing and so patently true as this one:
If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of

our parents, by genuine emancipation we do kill something vital
in them – not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contrib-
uting to their dying.
(Loewald, 1979, p. 395)
Perhaps the most important measure of the worth of this volume is

the degree to which I am able to find in the texts I discuss more than
what was there before I read them. While the words on the page
remain the same, what changes when I am successful in reading crea-
tively are the meanings of the words and sentences, meanings that have
been waiting to be found, but have never until the present moment
found a reader to discover them, to be changed by them, and to change
those potential meanings in the process of discovering them.
10
2
Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” and the
origins of object relations theory
Some writers write what they think; others think what they write.
The latter seem to do their thinking in the very act of writing, as if
thoughts arise from the conjunction of pen and paper, the work
unfolding by surprise as it goes. Freud in many of his most important
books and articles, including “Mourning and melancholia” (1917a),
was a writer of this latter sort. In these writings, Freud made no
attempt to cover his tracks, for example, his false starts, his uncertain-
ties, his reversals of thinking (often done mid-sentence), his shelving
of compelling ideas for the time being because they seemed to him
too speculative or lacking adequate clinical foundation.
The legacy that Freud left was not simply a set of ideas, but, as
important, and inseparable from those ideas, a new way of thinking
about human experience that gave rise to nothing less than a new
form of human subjectivity. Each of his psychoanalytic writings,
from this point of view, is simultaneously an explication of a set of
concepts and a demonstration of a newly created way of thinking
about and experiencing ourselves.
I have chosen to look closely at Freud’s “Mourning and melan-
cholia” for two reasons. First, I consider this paper to be one of
Freud’s most important contributions in that it develops for the first
time, in a systematic way, a line of thought which later would be
termed “object relations theory” (Fairbairn, 1952). I use the term
object relations theory to refer to a group of psychoanalytic theories
holding in common a loosely knit set of metaphors that address the
intrapsychic and interpersonal effects of relationships among uncon-
scious “internal” objects, that is, among unconscious split-off parts of
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the personality. This line of thought has played a major role in

shaping psychoanalysis from 1917 onward. Second, I have found that
attending closely to Freud’s writing as writing in “Mourning and
melancholia” provides an extraordinary opportunity not only to
listen to Freud think, but also, through the writing, to enter into that
thinking process with him. In this way, the reader may learn a good
deal about what is distinctive to the new form of thinking (and its
attendant subjectivity) that Freud was in the process of creating in
this article.
Freud wrote “Mourning and melancholia” in less than three
months in early 1915 during a period that was for him filled with
great intellectual and emotional upheaval. Europe was in the throes
of the First World War. Despite his protestations, two of Freud’s sons
volunteered for military service and fought on the front lines. Freud
was at the same time in the grips of intense intellectual foment. In the
years 1914 and 1915, he wrote a series of 12 essays which represented
his first major revision of psychoanalytic theory since the publication
of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud’s intent was to publish
these papers as a book to be titled “Preliminaries to a metapsy-
chology.” He hoped that this collection would “provide a stable
theoretical foundation for psycho-analysis” (Freud, quoted by
Strachey, 1957, p. 105).
In the summer of 1915, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, “The twelve
articles are, as it were, ready” (Gay, 1988, p. 367). As the phrase “as
it were” suggests, Freud had misgivings about what he had written.
Only five of the essays – all of which are groundbreaking papers –
were ever published: “Instincts and their vicissitudes” (1915a),
“Repression” (1915b), and “The unconscious” (1915c) were
published as journal articles in 1915. “A metapsychological supple-
ment to the theory of dreams” and “Mourning and melancholia,”
although completed in 1915, were not published until 1917. Freud
destroyed the other seven articles which, he told Ferenczi, “deserved
suppression and silence” (Gay, 1988, p. 373). None of these articles
were shown to even his innermost circle of friends. Freud’s reasons
for “silencing” these essays remain a mystery in the history of psycho-
analysis.
In the discussion that follows, I take up five portions of the text of
“Mourning and melancholia,” each of which contains a pivotal
contribution to the analytic understanding of the unconscious work
of mourning and of melancholia; at the same time, I look at the way
12
Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia”
Freud made use of this seemingly focal exploration of these two

psychological states as a vehicle for introducing – as much implicitly
as explicitly – the foundations of his theory of unconscious internal
object relations. (I am using Strachey’s 1957 translation of “Mourning
and melancholia” [1917a] in the Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud as the text for my discussion. It is
beyond the scope of this paper to address questions relating to the
quality of that translation.)
The disturbance of self-regard
Freud’s unique voice resounds in the opening sentence of “Mourning

and melancholia”:
Dreams having served us as the prototype in normal life of narcis-

sistic mental disorders, we will now try to throw some light on the
nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of
mourning.
(p. 243)
The voice we hear in Freud’s writing is remarkably constant through

the 23 volumes of the Standard Edition. It is a voice with which no
other psychoanalyst has written because no other analyst has had the
right to do so. The voice Freud creates is that of the founding father
of a new discipline. Less than a year before writing “Mourning and
melancholia,” Freud (1914a) remarked that no one need wonder
about his role in the history of psychoanalysis: “Psycho-analysis is my
creation; for ten years I was the only person who concerned himself
with it” (p. 7). Already in the opening sentence of this paper, some-
thing quite remarkable can be heard which we regularly take for
granted in reading Freud: in the course of the 20 years preceding the
writing of this sentence, Freud had not only created a revolutionary
conceptual system, he had altered language itself. It is for me
astounding to observe that virtually every word in the opening
sentence has acquired in Freud’s hands new meanings and a new set
of relationships, not only to practically every other word in the
sentence, but to innumerable words in language as a whole. For
example, the word “dreams,” which begins the sentence, is a word
that conveys rich layers of meaning and mystery that did not exist
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prior to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Concentrated in this word newly created by Freud are allusions to
(1) a conception of a repressed unconscious inner world that power-
fully, but obliquely, exerts force on conscious experience, and vice
versa; (2) a view that sexual desire is present from birth onward and
is rooted in bodily instincts which manifest themselves in universal
unconscious incestuous wishes, parricidal fantasies, and fears of retal-
iation in the form of genital mutilation; (3) a recognition of the role
of dreaming as an essential conversation between unconscious and
preconscious aspects of ourselves; and (4) a radical reconceptualiza-
tion of human symbology – at once universal and exquisitely idio-
syncratic to the life history of each individual. Of course, this list is
only a sampling of the meanings that the word dream, newly made
by Freud, invokes.
Similarly, the words “normal life,” “mental disorders,” and
“narcissistic” speak to one another and to the word “dream” in ways
that simply could not have occurred 20 years earlier. The second half
of the sentence suggests that two other words denoting aspects of
human experience will be made anew in this paper: “mourning” and
“melancholia.” (Freud’s term melancholia is roughly synonymous
with depression as the latter term is currently used.)
The logic of the central argument of “Mourning and melancholia”
begins to unfold as Freud compares the psychological features of
mourning to those of melancholia: both are responses to loss and
involve “grave departures from the normal attitude to life” (p. 243).
Freud comments that “it never occurs to us to regard [mourning] as
a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely
on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon
any interference with it as useless or even harmful” (pp. 243–244).
This observation is offered as a statement of the self-evident and may
have been so in Vienna in 1915. But, to my mind, that understanding
today is paid lip service far more often than it is genuinely honored.
In melancholia, one finds
a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside

world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a
lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utter-
ance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delu-
sional expectation of punishment.
(p. 244)
14
Freud points out that the same traits characterize mourning – with
one exception: “the disturbance of self-regard.” Only in retrospect
will the reader realize that the full weight of the thesis that Freud
develops in this paper rests on this simple observation made almost in
passing: “The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but
otherwise the features are the same” (p. 244). As in every good detec-
tive novel, all clues necessary for solving the crime are laid out in
plain view practically from the outset.
With the background of the discussion of the similarities and
differences – there is only one symptomatic difference – between
mourning and melancholia, the paper seems abruptly to plunge into
the exploration of the unconscious. In melancholia, the patient and the
analyst may not even know what the patient has lost – a remarkable
idea from the point of view of common sense in 1915. Even when the
melancholic is aware that he has suffered the loss of a person, “he
knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (p. 245).
There is ambiguity in Freud’s language here. Is the melancholic
unaware of the sort of importance the tie to the object held for him:
“what [the melancholic] has lost in [losing] him.” Or is the melancholic
unaware of what he has lost in himself as a consequence of losing the
object? The ambiguity – whether or not Freud intended it – subtly
introduces the important notion of the simultaneity and interdepend-
ence of two unconscious aspects of object loss in melancholia. One
involves the nature of the melancholic’s tie to the object and the other
involves an alteration of the self in response to the loss of the object.
This [lack of awareness on the part of the melancholic of what he

has lost] would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to
an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contra-
distinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss
that is unconscious.
(p. 245)
In his effort to understand the nature of the unconscious object-

loss in melancholia, Freud returns to the sole observable symptomatic
difference between mourning and melancholia: the melancholic’s
diminished self-esteem.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in

melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us
15
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as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable;

he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out
and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiser-
ates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so
unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place
in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares
that he was never any better.
(p. 246)
More in his use of language than in explicit theoretical statements,

Freud’s model of the mind is being reworked here. There is a steady
flow of subject–object, I–me pairings in this passage: the patient as
subject reproaches, abases, vilifies himself as object (and extends the
reproaches backward and forward in time). What is being suggested
– and only suggested – is that these subject–object pairings extend
beyond consciousness into the timeless unconscious and constitute
what is going on unconsciously in melancholia that is not occurring
in mourning. The unconscious is in this sense a metaphorical
place in which the “I–me” pairings are unconscious psychological
contents that actively engage in a continuous timeless attack by the
subject (I) upon the object (me) which depletes the ego (a concept in
transition here) to the point that it becomes “poor and empty” in the
process.
The melancholic is ill in that he stands in a different relationship to
his failings than does the mourner. The melancholic does not evidence
the shame one would expect of a person who experiences himself as
“petty, egoistic and dishonest” (p. 246), instead demonstrating an
“insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-expo-
sure” (p. 247). Each time Freud returns to the observation of the
melancholic’s diminished self-regard, he makes use of it to illuminate
a different aspect of the unconscious “internal work” (p. 245) of
melancholia. This time the observation, with its accrued set of mean-
ings, becomes an important underpinning for a new conception of
the ego, which up to this point has only been hinted at:
the melancholic’s disorder affords [a view] of the constitution of

the human ego. We see how in [the melancholic] one part of the
ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it
were, takes it as its object . . . What we are here becoming
acquainted with is the agency commonly called ‘conscience’ . . .
16
and we shall come upon evidence to show that it can become

diseased on its own account.
(p. 247)
Here, Freud is re-conceiving the ego in several important ways.

These revisions taken together constitute the first of a set of tenets
underlying Freud’s emerging psychoanalytic theory of unconscious
internal object relations: (1) The ego, now a psychic structure with
conscious and unconscious components (“parts”), can be split; (2) an
unconscious split-off aspect of the ego has the capacity to independ-
ently generate thoughts and feelings – in the case of the critical agency
these thoughts and feelings are of a self-observing moralistic, judg-
mental sort; (3) a split-off part of the ego may enter into an uncon-
scious relationship to another part of the ego; and (4) a split-off aspect
of the ego may be either healthy or pathological.
Object-loss transformed into ego-loss
The paper becomes positively fugue-like in its structure as Freud

takes up still again – yet in a new way – the sole symptomatic differ-
ence between mourning and melancholia:
If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-

accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often
the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient
himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit
someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or
should love . . . So we find the key to the clinical picture: we
perceive that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved
object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s
own ego.
(p. 248)
Thus, Freud, as if developing enhanced observational acuity as he

writes, sees something he previously had not noticed – that the accu-
sations the melancholic heaps upon himself represent unconsciously
displaced attacks on the loved object. This observation serves as a
starting point from which Freud goes on to posit a second set of
elements of his object relations theory.
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In considering the melancholic’s unconscious reproaches of the

loved object, Freud picks up a thread that he had introduced earlier
in the discussion. Melancholia often involves a psychological struggle
involving ambivalent feelings for the loved object as “in the case of a
betrothed girl who has been jilted” (p. 245). Freud elaborates on the
role of ambivalence in melancholia by observing that melancholics
show not the slightest humility despite their insistence on their own
worthlessness “and always seem as though they felt slighted and had
been treated with great injustice” (p. 248). Their intense sense of
entitlement and injustice “is possible only because the reactions
expressed in their behaviour still proceed from a mental constellation
of revolt, which has then, by a certain process, passed over into the
crushed state of melancholia” (p. 248).
It seems to me that Freud is suggesting that the melancholic experi-
ences outrage (as opposed to anger of other sorts) at the object for
disappointing him and doing him a “great injustice.” This emotional
protest/revolt is crushed in melancholia as a consequence of “a certain
process.” It is the delineation of that “certain process” in theoretical
terms that will occupy much of the remainder of “Mourning and
melancholia.”
The reader can hear unmistakable excitement in Freud’s voice in
the sentence that follows: “There is no difficulty in reconstructing
this [transformative] process” (p. 248). Ideas are falling into place. A
certain clarity is emerging from the tangle of seemingly contradictory
observations, for example, the melancholic’s combination of severe
self-condemnation and vociferous self-righteous outrage. In spelling
out the psychological process mediating the melancholic’s move-
ment from revolt (against injustices he has suffered) to a crushed
state, Freud, with extraordinary dexterity, presents a radically new
conception of the structure of the unconscious:
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular

person, had at one time existed [for the melancholic]; then, owing
to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person,
the object relationship was shattered. The result was not the
normal one of a withdrawal of the libido [loving emotional energy]
from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one . . .
[Instead,] the object-cathexis [the emotional investment in the
object] proved to have little power of resistance [little capacity to
maintain the tie to the object], and was brought to an end. But the
18
free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was with-

drawn into the ego. There, . . . it [the loving emotional invest-
ment which has been withdrawn from the object] served to
establish an identification of [a part of] the ego with the abandoned
object. Thus, the shadow of the object fell upon [a part of] the
ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency
[another part of the ego], as though it were an object, the forsaken
object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss
[a diminution of one’s self-regard] and the conflict between the
ego and the loved person [was transformed] into a cleavage
between the critical activity of [a part of] the ego [later to be called
the superego] and the ego as altered by identification.
(pp. 248–249)
These sentences represent a powerfully succinct demonstration of

the way Freud in this paper was beginning to write/think theoreti-
cally and clinically in terms of relationships between unconscious,
paired, split-off aspects of the ego (i.e. about unconscious internal
object relations1). Freud, for the first time, is gathering together into
a coherent narrative expressed in higher-order theoretical terms his
newly conceived revised model of the mind.
There is so much going on in this passage that it is difficult to
know where to start in discussing it. Freud’s use of language seems to
me to afford a port of entry into this critical moment in the develop-
ment of psychoanalytic thought. There is an important shift in the
language Freud is using that serves to convey a rethinking of an
important aspect of his conception of melancholia. The words
1 While Freud made use of the idea of “an internal world” in “Mourning and melan-
cholia,” it was Klein (1935, 1940, 1952) who transformed the idea into a systematic
theory of the structure of the unconscious and of the interplay between the internal
object world and the world of external objects. In developing her conception of the
unconscious, Klein richly contributed to a critical alteration of analytic theory. She shifted
the dominant metaphors from those associated with Freud’s topographic and structural
models to a set of spatial metaphors (some stated, some only suggested in “Mourning
and melancholia”). These spatial metaphors depict an unconscious inner world inhabited
by “internal objects” – split-off aspects of the ego – that are bound together in “internal
object relationships” by powerful affective ties. (See Chapters 3 and 4 for discussions of
the concepts of “internal objects” and “internal object relations” as these ideas evolved in
the work of Freud, Klein, Isaacs, and Fairbairn; see also Ogden, 1983.)
19
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“object-loss,” “lost object,” and even “lost as an object of love,” are,

without comment on Freud’s part, replaced by the words “aban-
doned object” and “forsaken object.”
The melancholic’s “abandonment” of the object (as opposed to the
mourner’s loss of the object) involves a paradoxical psychological
event: the abandoned object, for the melancholic, is preserved in the
form of an identification with it: “Thus [in identifying with the object]
the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” (p. 249). In melancholia,
the ego is altered not by the glow of the object, but (more darkly)
by “the shadow of the object.” The shadow metaphor suggests that
the melancholic’s experience of identifying with the abandoned object
has a thin, two-dimensional quality as opposed to a lively, robust
feeling tone. The painful experience of loss is short-circuited by
the melancholic’s identification with the object, thus denying
the separateness of the object: the object is me and I am the object.
There is no loss; an external object (the abandoned object) is omnipo-
tently replaced by an internal one (the ego-identified-with-the-
object).
So, in response to the pain of loss, the ego is twice split, forming
an internal object relationship in which one split-off part of the ego
(the critical agency) angrily (with outrage) turns on another split-off
part of the ego (the ego-identified-with-the-object). Although Freud
does not speak in these terms, it could be said that the internal object
relationship is created for the purpose of evading the painful
feeling of object loss. This avoidance is achieved by means of an
unconscious “deal with the devil”: in exchange for the evasion of the
pain of object-loss, the melancholic is doomed to experience the
sense of lifelessness that comes as a consequence of disconnecting
oneself from large portions of external reality. In this sense, the
melancholic forfeits a substantial part of his own life – the three-
dimensional emotional life lived in the world of real external objects.
The internal world of the melancholic is powerfully shaped by
the wish to hold captive the object in the form of an imaginary
substitute for it – the ego-identified-with-the-object. In a sense, the
internalization of the object renders the object forever captive to the
melancholic and at the same time renders the melancholic endlessly
captive to it.
A dream of one of my patients comes to mind as a particularly
poignant expression of the frozen quality of the melancholic’s uncon-
scious internal object world.
20
The patient, Mr. K, began analysis a year after the death of his wife
of 22 years. In a dream that Mr. K reported several years into the
analysis, he was attending a gathering in which a tribute was to be
paid to someone whose identity was unclear to him. Just as the
proceedings were getting under way, a man in the audience rose to
his feet and spoke glowingly of Mr. K’s fine character and impor-
tant accomplishments. When the man finished, the patient stood
and expressed his gratitude for the high praise, but said that the
purpose of the meeting was to pay tribute to the guest of honor, so
the group’s attention should be directed to him. Immediately upon
Mr. K’s sitting down, another person stood and again praised the
patient at great length. Mr. K again stood and after briefly repeating
his statement of gratitude for the adulation, he re-directed the
attention of the gathering to the honored guest. This sequence was
repeated again and again until the patient had the terrifying realiza-
tion (in the dream) that this sequence would go on forever. Mr. K
awoke from the dream with his heart racing in a state of panic.
The patient had told me in the sessions preceding the dream that
he had become increasingly despairing of ever being able to love
another woman and “resume life.” He said he has never ceased
expecting his wife to return home after work each evening at six-
thirty. He added that every family event after her death has been for
him nothing more than another occasion at which his wife is
missing. He apologized for his lugubrious, self-pitying tones.
I told Mr. K that I thought that the dream captured a sense of
the way he feels imprisoned in his inability genuinely to be inter-
ested in, much less honor, new experiences with people. In the
dream, he, in the form of the guests paying endless homage to
him, directed to himself what might have been interest paid to
someone outside of himself, someone outside of his internally
frozen relationship with his wife. I went on to say that it was
striking that the honored guest in the dream was not given a name,
much less an identity and human qualities which might have
stirred curiosity, puzzlement, anger, jealousy, envy, compassion,
love, admiration or any other set of feeling responses to another
person. I added that the horror he felt at the end of the dream
seemed to reflect his awareness that the static state of self-
imprisonment in which he lives is potentially endless. (A good deal
of this interpretation referred back to many discussions Mr. K and
I had had concerning his state of being “stuck” in a world that no
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longer existed.) Mr. K responded by telling me that as I was

speaking he remembered another part of the dream made up of a
single still image of himself wrapped in heavy chains, unable to
move even a single muscle of his body. He said he felt repelled by
the extreme passivity of the image.
The dreams and the discussion that followed represented some-
thing of a turning point in the analysis. The patient’s response to
separations from me between sessions and during weekend and
holiday breaks became less frighteningly bleak for him. In the
period following this session, Mr. K found that he sometimes
could go for hours without experiencing the heavy bodily sensa-
tion in his chest that he had lived with unremittingly since his
wife’s death.
While the idea of the melancholic’s unconscious identification

with the lost/abandoned object for Freud held “the key to the clin-
ical picture” (p. 248) of melancholia, Freud believed that the key to
the theoretical problem of melancholia would have to satisfactorily
resolve an important contradiction:
on the one hand, a strong fixation [an intense, yet static emotional
tie] to the loved object must have been present; on the other hand,
in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis must have had little
power of resistance [i.e. little power to maintain that tie to the
object in the face of actual or feared death of the object or object-
loss as a consequence of disappointment].
(p. 249)
The “key” to a psychoanalytic theory of melancholia that resolves

the contradiction of the co-existing strong fixation to the object
and the lack of tenacity of that object-tie lies, for Freud, in the
concept of narcissism: “this contradiction seems to imply that
the object-choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis, so that
the object-cathexis, when obstacles come in its way, can regress to
narcissism” (p. 249).
Freud’s theory of narcissism, which he had introduced only months
earlier in his paper, “On narcissism: An introduction” (1914b),
provided an important part of the context for the object relations
theory of melancholia that he was developing in “Mourning and
melancholia.” In his narcissism paper, Freud proposed that the normal
22
infant begins in a state of “original” or “primary” narcissism (p. 75),

a state in which all emotional energy is ego libido, a form of emotional
investment that takes the ego (oneself) as its sole object. The infant
makes a step toward the world outside of himself in the form of
narcissistic identification – a type of object tie that treats the external
object as an extension of oneself.
From the intermediate position of narcissistic identification, the
healthy infant, in time, develops sufficient psychological stability to
engage in a narcissistic form of relatedness to objects in which the tie
to the object is largely made up of a displacement of ego libido from
the ego onto the object (Freud, 1914b).
Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis

of the ego, from which some [of the emotional investment in the
ego] is later given off to objects, but [the emotional investment in
the ego] . . . fundamentally persists and is related to the [narcis-
sistic] object-cathexes, much as the body of an amoeba is related
to the pseudopodia which it puts out.
(ibid., p. 75)
In other words, a narcissistic object tie is one in which the object is

invested with emotional energy that originally was directed at oneself
(and, in that sense, the object is a stand-in for the self). The move-
ment from narcissistic identification to narcissistic object tie is a
matter of a small but significant shift in the degree of recognition of,
and emotional investment in, the otherness of the object.
The healthy infant is then able to go on to achieve a differentiation
of ego-libido and object-libido. In this process of differentiation, he
is beginning to engage in a form of object love that is not simply a
displacement of love of oneself onto the object. Instead, a more
mature form of object love evolves in which the infant achieves
relatedness to objects that are experienced as external to himself –
outside the realm of the infant’s omnipotence.
Herein lies for Freud the key to the theoretical problem – the
“contradiction” – posed by melancholia: melancholia is a disease of
narcissism. A necessary “pre-condition” (p. 249) for melancholia is a
disturbance in early narcissistic development. The melancholic
patient in infancy and childhood was unable to move successfully
from narcissism to object-love. Consequently, in the face of object
loss or disappointment, the melancholic is incapable of mourning,
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i.e. unable to face the reality of the loss of the object, and, over time,
to enter into mature object love with another person. The melan-
cholic does not have the capacity to disengage from the lost object
and instead evades the pain of loss through regression from narcis-
sistic object relatedness to narcissistic identification: “the result of
which is that in spite of the conflict [disappointment leading to
outrage] with the loved person, the love relation need not be given
up” (p. 249). As Freud put it in a summary statement near the end of
the paper, “So by taking flight into the ego [by means of a powerful
narcissistic identification] love escapes extinction” (p. 247).
A misreading of “Mourning and melancholia,” to my mind, has
become entrenched in what is commonly held to be Freud’s view of
melancholia (see, for example, Gay, 1988, pp. 372–373). What I am
referring to is the misconception that melancholia, according to
Freud, involves an identification with the hated aspect of an ambiva-
lently loved object that has been lost. Such a reading, while accurate
so far as it goes, misses the central point of Freud’s thesis. What
differentiates the melancholic from the mourner is the fact that the
melancholic all along has been able to engage only in narcissistic
forms of object relatedness. The narcissistic nature of the melanchol-
ic’s personality renders him incapable of maintaining a firm connec-
tion with the painful reality of the irrevocable loss of the object,
which is necessary for mourning. Melancholia involves ready,
reflexive recourse to regression to narcissistic identification as a way
of not experiencing the hard edge of recognition of one’s inability to
undo the fact of the loss of the object.
Object relations theory, as it is taking shape in the course of Freud’s
writing this paper, now includes an early developmental axis. The
world of unconscious internal object relations is being viewed by
Freud as a defensive regression to very early forms of object related-
ness in response to psychological pain – in the case of the melan-
cholic, the pain is the pain of loss. The individual replaces what might
have become a three-dimensional relatedness to the mortal and at
times disappointing external object with a two-dimensional (shadow-
like) relationship to an internal object that exists in a psychological
domain outside of time (and consequently sheltered from the reality
of death). In so doing, the melancholic evades the pain of loss, and,
by extension, other forms of psychological pain, but does so at an
enormous cost – the loss of a good deal of his own (emotional)
vitality.
24
One unconscious part of the ego stalking another
Having hypothesized the melancholic’s substitution of an uncon-

scious internal object relationship for an external one, and having
wed this to a conception of defensive regression to narcissistic iden-
tification, Freud turns to a third defining feature of melancholia
which, as will be seen, provides the basis for another important
feature of his psychoanalytic theory of unconscious internal object
relationships:
In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend

for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and
include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disap-
pointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate
into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambiva-
lence. . . . The melancholic’s erotic cathexis [erotic emotional
investment in the object] . . . has thus undergone a double vicis-
situde: part of it has regressed to [narcissistic] identification, but the
other part, under the influence of the conflict due to ambivalence,
has been carried back to the stage of sadism.
(pp. 251–252)
Sadism is a form of object tie in which hate (the melancholic’s

outrage at the object) becomes inextricably intertwined with erotic
love, and in this combined state can be an even more powerful
binding force (in a suffocating, subjugating, tyrannizing way) than
the ties of love alone. The sadism in melancholia – generated in
response to the loss of or disappointment by a loved object – gives
rise to a special form of torment for both the subject and the object:
that particular mixture of love and hate encountered in stalking. In
this sense, the sadistic aspect of the relationship of the critical agency
to the split-off ego-identified-with-the-object might be thought of
as a relentless, crazed stalking of one split-off aspect of the ego
by another – what Fairbairn (1944) would later view as the love/
hate bond between the libidinal ego and the exciting object
(see Chapter 4).
This conception of the enormous binding force of combined love
and hate is an integral part of the psychoanalytic understanding of the
astounding durability of pathological internal object relations. Such
allegiance to the bad (hated and hating) internal object is often the
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source of both the stability of the pathological structure of the

patient’s personality organization, and of some of the most intractable
transference–countertransference impasses that we encounter in
analytic work. In addition, the bonds of love mixed with hate account
for such forms of pathological relationships as the ferocious ties of the
abused child and the battered spouse to their abusers (and the tie of
the abusers to the abused). The abuse is unconsciously experienced
by both abused and abuser as loving hate and hateful love – both of
which are far preferable to no object relationship at all (Fairbairn,
1944).
The psychotic edge of mania and melancholia
Employing one of his favorite extended metaphors – the analyst as

detective – Freud creates in his writing a sense of adventure, risk-
taking and even suspense as he takes on “the most remarkable charac-
teristic of melancholia, . . . its tendency to change round into mania – a
state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms” (p. 258). Freud’s use
of language in his discussion of mania – which is inseparable from the
ideas he presents – creates for the reader a sense of the fundamental
differences between mourning and melancholia, and between healthy
(internal and external) object relationships and pathological ones.
I cannot promise that this attempt [to explain mania] will prove
entirely satisfactory. It hardly carries us much beyond the possi-
bility of taking one’s initial bearings. We have two things to go
upon: the first is a psycho-analytic impression, and the second
what we may perhaps call a matter of general economic experi-
ence. The [psycho-analytic] impression . . . is that . . . both disor-
ders [mania and melancholia] are wrestling with the same,
[unconscious] ‘complex’, but that probably in melancholia the ego
has succumbed to the complex [in the form of a painful feeling of
having been crushed] whereas in mania it has mastered it [the pain
of loss] or pushed it aside.
(p. 253–254)
The second of the two things “we have . . . to go upon” is “general

economic experience.” In attempting to account for the feelings of
exuberance and triumph in mania, Freud hypothesized that the
26
economics of mania – the quantitative distribution and play of

psychological forces – may be similar to those seen when
some poor wretch, by winning a large sum of money, is suddenly

relieved from chronic worry about his daily bread, or when a long
and arduous struggle is finally crowned with success, or when a
man finds himself in a position to throw off at a single blow some
oppressive compulsion, some false position which he has long had
to keep up, and so on.
(p. 254)
Beginning with the pun on “economic conditions” in the descrip-

tion of the poor wretch who wins a great deal of money, the sentence
goes on to capture something of the feel of mania in its succession of
images which are unlike any other set of images in the article. These
dramatic cameos suggest to me Freud’s own understandable magical
wishes to have his own “arduous struggle . . . finally crowned with
success” or to be able “to throw off at a single blow [his own] . . .
oppressive compulsion” to write prodigious numbers of books and
articles in his efforts to attain for himself and psychoanalysis the
stature they deserve. And like the inevitable end of the expanding
bubble of mania, the driving force of the succession of images seems
to collapse into the sentences that immediately follow:
This explanation [of mania by analogy to other forms of sudden

release from pain] certainly sounds plausible, but in the first place
it is too indefinite, and, secondly, it gives rise to more new prob-
lems and doubts than we can answer. We will not evade a discus-
sion of them, even though we cannot expect it to lead us to a clear
understanding.
(p. 255)
Freud – whether or not he was aware of it – is doing more than

alerting the reader to his uncertainties regarding how to understand
mania and its relation to melancholia; he is showing the reader in his
use of language, in the structure of his thinking and writing, what it
sounds like and feels like to think and write in a way that does not
attempt to confuse what is omnipotently, self-deceptively, wished
for with what is real; words are used in an effort to simply, accurately,
clearly give ideas and situations their proper names.
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Bion’s work provides a useful context for understanding more fully

the significance of Freud’s comment that he will not “evade” the new
problems and doubts to which his hypothesis gives rise. Bion (1962a)
uses the idea of evasion to refer to what he believes to be a hallmark of
psychosis: eluding pain rather than attempting to symbolize it for
oneself (for example, in dreaming), live with it, and do genuine psycho-
logical work with it over time. The latter response to pain – living
with it, symbolizing it for oneself, and doing psychological work with
it – lies at the heart of the experience of mourning. In contrast, the
manic patient who “master[s] the [pain of loss] . . . or push[es] it aside”
(Freud, 1917a, p. 244) transforms what might become a feeling of
terrible disappointment, aloneness and impotent rage into a state
resembling “joy, exultation or triumph” (ibid., p. 254).
I believe that Freud, here, without explicit acknowledgment – and
perhaps without conscious awareness – begins to address the psychotic
edge of mania and melancholia. The psychotic aspects of both mania
and melancholia involve the evasion of grief as well as a good deal of
external reality. This is effected by means of multiple splittings of the
ego in conjunction with the creation of a timeless imaginary internal
object relationship which omnipotently substitutes for the loss of a
real external object relationship. More broadly speaking, a fantasied
unconscious internal object world replaces an actual external one,
omnipotence replaces helplessness, immortality substitutes for the
uncompromising realities of the passage of time and of death, triumph
replaces despair, contempt substitutes for love.
Thus Freud (in part explicitly, in part implicitly, and perhaps in
part unknowingly) through his discussion of mania adds another
important element to his evolving object relations theory. The reader
can hear in Freud’s use of language (for example, in his comments on
the manic patient triumphantly pushing aside the pain of loss and
exulting in his imaginary victory over the lost object) the idea that
the unconscious internal object world of the manic patient is
constructed for the purpose of evading, “taking flight” (p. 257) from,
the external reality of loss and death. This act of taking flight from
external reality has the effect of plunging the patient into a sphere of
omnipotent thinking cut off from life lived in relation to actual
external objects. The world of external object relations becomes
depleted as a consequence of its having been disconnected from the
individual’s unconscious internal object world. The patient’s experi-
ence in the world of external objects is disconnected from the
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enlivening “fire” (Loewald, 1978, p. 189) of the unconscious internal

object world. Conversely, the unconscious internal object world,
having been cut off from the world of external objects, cannot grow,
cannot “learn from experience” (Bion, 1962a), and cannot enter (in
more than a very limited way) into generative “conversations”
between unconscious and preconscious aspects of oneself “at the
frontier of dreaming” (Ogden, 2001).
The wish to continue living and the wish to be at one

with the dead
Freud concludes the paper with a series of thoughts on a wide range

of topics related to mourning and melancholia. Of these, his expan-
sion of the concept of ambivalence is, I believe, the one that repre-
sents the most important contribution both to the understanding of
melancholia and to the development of his object relations theory.
Freud had discussed on many previous occasions, beginning as early
as 1900, a view of ambivalence as an unconscious conflict of love and
hate in which the individual unconsciously loves the same person he
hates, for example, in the distressing ambivalence of healthy Oedipal
experience or in the paralyzing torments of the ambivalence of the
obsessional neurotic. In “Mourning and melancholia,” Freud uses
the term ambivalence in a strikingly different way; he uses it to refer to
a struggle between the wish to live with the living and the wish to be
at one with the dead:
hate and love contend with each other [in melancholia]; the one
seeks to detach the libido from the object [thus allowing the subject
to live and the object to die], the other to maintain this position of
the libido [which is bonded to the immortal internal version of the
object].
(p. 256)
Thus, the melancholic experiences a conflict between, on the one

hand, the wish to be alive with the pain of irreversible loss and the
reality of death, and on the other hand, the wish to deaden himself
to the pain of loss and the knowledge of death. The individual capable
of mourning succeeds in freeing himself from the struggle between
life and death that freezes the melancholic: “mourning impels the
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ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and

offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live” (p. 257). So
the mourner’s painful acceptance of the reality of the death of the
object is achieved in part because the mourner knows (unconsciously
and, at times, consciously) that his own life, his own capacity for
“continuing to live” is at stake.
I am reminded of a patient who began analysis with me almost
20 years after the death of her husband.
Ms. G told me that not long after her husband’s death, she had
spent a weekend alone at a lake where for each of the 15 years prior
to his death, she and her husband had rented a cabin. She told me
that during a trip to the lake soon after his death, she had set out
alone in a motorboat and headed toward a labyrinth of small islands
and tortuous waterways that she and her husband had explored
many times. Ms. G said that the idea had come to her with a sense
of absolute certainty that her husband was in that set of waterways,
and that if she were to have entered that part of the lake, she never
would have come out because she would not have been able to
“tear” herself away from him. She told me that she had had to fight
with all her might not to go to be with her husband.
That decision not to follow her husband into death became an
important symbol in the analysis of the patient’s choosing to live
her life in a world filled with the pain of grief and her living
memories of her husband. As the analysis proceeded, that same
event at the lake came to symbolize something quite different:
the incompleteness of her act of “tearing” herself away from
her husband after his death. It became increasingly clear in the
transference–countertransference that, in an important sense, a
part of herself had gone with her husband into death, that is, an
aspect of herself had been deadened, and that that had been “all
right” with her until that juncture in the analysis.
In the course of the subsequent year of analysis, Ms. G experi-
enced a sense of enormous loss – not only the loss of her husband,
but also the loss of her own life. She confronted for the first time
the pain and sadness of the recognition of the ways she had for
decades unconsciously limited herself with regard to utilizing her
intelligence and artistic talents as well as her capacities to fully be
alive in her everyday experience (including her analysis). (I do not
view Ms. G as having been manic, or even as having relied heavily
30
on manic defenses, but I believe that she held in common with the
manic patient a form of ambivalence that involves a tension
between, on the one hand, the wish to live life among the living
– internally and externally – and, on the other hand, the wish
to exist with the dead in a timeless dead and deadening internal
object world.)
Returning to Freud’s discussion of mania, the manic patient is

engaged in a “struggle of ambivalence [in a desperate unconscious
effort to come to life through] . . . loosening the fixation of libido to
the [internal] object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it
were killing it” (p. 257).2 This sentence is surprising: mania repre-
sents not only the patient’s effort to evade the pain of grief by dispar-
aging and denigrating the object. Mania also represents the patient’s
(often unsuccessful) attempts to achieve grief by freeing himself from
the mutual captivity involved in the unconscious internal relation-
ship with the lost object. In order to grieve the loss of the object, one
must first kill it, that is, one must do the psychological work of
allowing the object to be irrevocably dead, both in one’s own mind
and in the external world.
By introducing the notion of a form of ambivalence involving the
struggle between the wish to go on living and the wish to deaden
oneself in an effort to be with the dead, Freud added a critical dimen-
sion to his object relations theory: the notion that unconscious
internal object relations may have either a living and enlivening
quality or a dead and deadening quality (and by extension, every
possible combination of the two). Such a way of conceiving the
internal object world has been central to the developments in psycho-
analytic theory pioneered by Winnicott (1971a) and Green (1983).
These authors have placed emphasis on the importance of the analyst’s
and the patient’s experiences of the aliveness and deadness of the
2 The reader can hear the voice of Melanie Klein (1935, 1940) in this part of Freud’s
comments on mania. All three elements of Klein’s (1935) well-known clinical triad charac-
terizing mania and the manic defense – control, contempt and triumph – can be found in
nascent form in Freud’s conception of mania. The object never will be lost or missed
because it is, in unconscious fantasy, under one’s omnipotent control, so there is no danger
of losing it; even if the object were lost, it would not matter because the contemptible
object is “valueless” (p. 257), and one is better off without it; moreover, being without the
object is a “triumph” (p. 254), an occasion for “enjoy[ing]” (p. 257) one’s emancipation
from the burdensome albatross that has been hanging from one’s neck.
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patient’s internal object world. The sense of aliveness and deadness of

the transference–countertransference is, to my mind, perhaps the
single most important measure of the status of the analytic process on
a moment-to-moment basis (Ogden, 1995, 1997). The sound of
much of current analytic thinking – and, I suspect, the sound of
psychoanalytic thinking yet to be thought – can be heard in Freud’s
“Mourning and melancholia,” if we know how to listen.
Freud closes the paper with a voice of genuine humility, breaking
off his inquiry mid-thought:
But here once again, it will be well to call a halt and to postpone
any further explanation of mania . . . As we already know, the
interdependence of the complicated problems of the mind forces
us to break off every enquiry before it is completed – till the
outcome of some other enquiry can come to its assistance.
(p. 259)
How better to end a paper on the pain of facing reality and the
consequences of attempts to evade it? The solipsistic world of a
psychoanalytic theorist who is not firmly grounded in the reality
of his lived experience with patients is very similar to the self-
imprisoned melancholic who survives in a timeless, deathless (and yet
deadened and deadening) internal object world.
Concluding comments
In presenting a reading of Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia,” I

have examined not only the ideas that Freud was introducing, but
also, as important, the way he was thinking/writing in this watershed
paper. I have attempted to demonstrate how Freud made use of his
exploration of the unconscious work of mourning and melancholia
to propose and explore some of the major tenets of a revised model
of the mind (which later would be termed object relations theory). The
principal tenets of the revised model presented in this 1917 paper
include: (1) the idea that the unconscious is organized to a significant
degree around stable internal object relations between paired split-off
parts of the ego; (2) the notion that psychic pain may be defended
against by means of the replacement of an external object relation-
ship by an unconscious, fantasized internal object relationship; (3) the
32
idea that pathological bonds of love mixed with hate are among the
strongest ties that bind internal objects to one another in a state of
mutual captivity; (4) the notion that the psychopathology of internal
object relations often involves the use of omnipotent thinking to a
degree that cuts off the dialogue between the unconscious internal
object world and the world of actual experience with real external
objects; and (5) the idea that ambivalence in relations between
unconscious internal objects involves not only conflict between feel-
ings of love and hate, but also conflict between wishes to continue to
be alive in one’s object relationships and wishes to be at one with
one’s dead internal objects.
33
3
Reading Susan Isaacs
Toward a radically revised theory of thinking
Susan Isaacs was chosen by Klein to present the opening paper in the
Controversial Discussions held by the British Psychoanalytical Society
between 1941 and 1945. Almost 70 years later, Isaacs’ contribution
holds up not simply as an historical landmark in the development of a
psychoanalytic theory of thinking, but as a critical part of contempo-
rary analytic theory. Isaacs’ paper, “The nature and function of phan-
tasy” (pre-circulated and presented to the British Psychoanalytical
Society on 27 January, 1943) is at the same time a “scientific” psycho-
analytic paper (a paper that presents and develops an original idea that
is accompanied by supporting evidence) and a political position paper
– a paper intended to establish Klein as a disciple of Freud, and not a
“heretic” (Steiner, 1991, p. 248) whose ideas so diverged from Freud’s
that her work no longer deserved to be viewed as psychoanalysis.
The version of Isaacs’ paper that I will be discussing was published
in Developments in Psychoanalysis (1952), a collection of papers written
and edited by Klein and her “inner circle” of Isaacs, Heimann and
Rivière. The original paper (Isaacs, 1943a) – much briefer than the
1952 version and structured quite differently – does, at times, express
ideas more compellingly than the 1952 version. I will cite such
passages in the earlier version of the paper when they elucidate ideas
being developed in the later one.
A good deal of the importance of Isaacs’ (1952) contribution lies
in her groundbreaking conception of the work of phantasy, which
she clearly and systematically presents. And yet I find that much of
what makes Isaacs’ contribution pivotal to the development of
psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
34
Isaacs’ radically revised theory of thinking
resides in what is only implicit in her paper. Specifically, it seems to

me that Isaacs does not fully recognize that her paper is not a paper
about the nature and function of phantasy, but a paper about the
nature and the function of phantasying, that is, it is a paper primarily
about thinking as opposed to a paper about thoughts. I attempt in my
discussion of Isaacs’ paper to extend ideas that she introduces in light
of subsequent contributions to analytic thinking.
It seems to me that Isaacs’ conception of the role of phantasy in the
internal world contributes to a profound revision of the central
psychoanalytic metaphors for the workings of the mind, that is, the
replacement of Freud’s structural model with a model of an inner
world structured by phantasied internal object relationships.
Moreover, I view Isaacs’ contribution as anticipating aspects of Bion’s
(1962a, 1962b) theory of thinking. What I attempt to do in this
paper is explicate the radical nature of Isaacs’ revision of analytic
theory, and, at the same time, articulate what Isaacs knew, but did
not know that she knew. What makes for a timeless paper in any
discipline is the way in which it is not only an original statement of
present understandings, but also constitutes a memoir of the future.
Isaacs’ paper, to my mind, is such a paper.
Isaacs’ aims and methodology
Isaacs (1952) indicates at the outset that she “is mostly concerned with
the definition of ‘phantasy’ ” (p. 67), and “is not primarily concerned
to establish any particular content of phantasy” (p. 68); instead, she
will address “the nature and function of phantasy as a whole, and its
place in the mental life” (p. 68). While she intends to demonstrate
that “the activity of phantasy [occurs] from the beginning of life”
(p. 69), she recognizes that this “does not automatically imply
accepting any particular phantasy content at any given age” (p. 69).
Thus, Isaacs refuses to get mired in the controversy concerning what
the infant is thinking or when a particular phantasy first occurs, but
instead focuses on “the activity of phantasy,” an activity that I believe
is more accurately expressed in the form of a verb – phantasying.
The crux of the difficulty involved in proposing a conception
of the unconscious phantasying activity of an infant lies in the fact
that the infant cannot tell us what he is thinking, feeling, or imag-
ining. “Our views about [unconscious] phantasy in these earliest
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years are based almost wholly upon inference, but then this is true at
any age” (p. 69). All that one can know about the unconscious is, by
definition, apprehended exclusively by inference. Consequently, the
intellectual rigor of the methodology used in making such inferences
is of critical importance.
Isaacs’ (1952) inferences are made on the basis of three principles
that she articulates: (1) “the need to attend to the precise details of a
child’s behaviour” (p. 70); (2) “the principle of noting and recording
the context of observed data . . . the whole immediate setting of
the behaviour being studied, in its social and emotional situation”
(p. 71), for example, the external reality with which the infant is
interacting; and (3) the principle of “genetic continuity” (p. 74).
The third of these principles holds a place of special importance in
the construction of Isaacs’ argument. She demonstrates that the
development of a child’s physical capacities and mental functions (for
example, learning to speak and to walk) can be observed to have
their origins in earliest infancy. Speech development begins with the
earliest sounds the infant makes (for instance, when he is hungry or
feeding) and develops by means of a combination of continuous
growth and of “crises” (p. 74), such as the child’s achieving the
capacity to speak its first words.
The principle of genetic continuity is critical to Isaacs’ argument
that the infant begins to generate unconscious phantasies from the
earliest days of life.
The established principle of genetic continuity is a concrete instrument of

knowledge. It enjoins upon us to accept no particular facts of behav-
iour or mental processes as sui generis, ready-made, or suddenly
emerging, but to regard them as items in a developing series. We
seek to trace them backwards through earlier and more rudimen-
tary stages to their most germinal forms . . .
(p. 75)
Isaacs here invokes the principle of genetic continuity in order to

lend support to a methodology that makes inferences about the nature
of unconscious phantasy in the earliest days of life on the basis of data
drawn, for example, from child analysis and symbolic play occurring
much later in the life of the child. A weakness in Isaacs’ argument lies
in the fact that while she recognizes that there is a constant tension
between continuity and discontinuity in physical and psychological
36
development, she places far greater emphasis on continuity than on

disjunction in development. In so doing, she underplays the impor-
tance of such phenomena as the quantum leaps in the evolution of the
morphology of every species, for example, the transformation that
takes place in butterfly larvae when their specialized organs break
down and give rise to undifferentiated clusters of cells that organize
themselves into “imaginal discs.” “Their spurt of growth now shapes
the organism according to a new plan. New organs arise from the
discs” (Karp and Berrill, 1981, p. 692). Thus, the morphology and
physiology of the mature butterfly is discontinuous from the
morphology and much of the physiology of the caterpillar while
the DNA of the caterpillar and the butterfly remain identical.
Similarly, in infantile development, Spitz (1965) points out that the
infant evidences not only developmental continuity, but also quantum
leaps in psychological development due to psychic reorganizations
that are reflected, for instance, in the virtually overnight appearance of
the infant’s smiling response at about three months, separation anxiety
at about seven months and the capacity for a yes/no response at
14 months. With regard to the appearance of the smiling response, for
example, there can be no mistaking that an enormous developmental
transformation has occurred in which the infant has become capable
of forms of experience, qualities of thinking, types of communication,
and forms of object relatedness that had not previously been part of his
psychic life. Such transformations do not involve gradual progression;
rather, they involve striking discontinuities that make it impossible to
“trace backwards” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 77), to deduce the nature of earlier
psychological capacities and states of mind on the basis of later ones.
In other words, observation of the infant capable of smiling does not
make it possible to make inferences about the psychological organiza-
tion and mental processes characterizing an earlier stage of the mental
life of the infant.
I will now turn to a second aspect of the assumptions underlying
Isaacs’ methodology. Reflecting the predominant thinking of her
time, the methodology upon which Isaacs relies to infer the nature of
early infantile unconscious phantasy involves viewing the infant’s
mental life as operating “within the infant” even though she acknowl-
edges that the infant’s mental state is responsive to events occurring
in external reality. In her statement of methodology, Isaacs (1952)
emphasizes the importance of observing both “precise details” (p. 70)
and “context” (p. 71) for making inferences regarding the infant’s
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internal world and its mental processes. The principal “context” of

the life of the infant is maternal care, which is consistently treated by
Isaacs as an event to which the infant is responding, rather than as an
experience in which the mother actively participates with the infant in
generating the infant’s internal life.
Isaacs, who died in 1948 (at the age of 63), did not have available
to her the concept of the mother–infant as a single psychological unit
(in tension with the mother and infant as separate entities), a concept
that Winnicott (1960) introduced in the form of his idea that “there
is no such thing as an infant” [apart from the maternal provision]
(p. 39 fn) and, at the same time, the mother and infant are distinctly
separate people. Bion (1959) and Rosenfeld (1965) cast their own
understandings of the mother–infant relationship in the form of their
conceptions of projective identification as an unconscious, psycho-
logical-interpersonal process through which mother and infant
engage in thinking together (while remaining separate entities)
beginning in earliest infancy. Consequently, Isaacs’ understanding of
infantile phantasy is cast almost entirely in terms of a conception of
the mind of the infant as a system independent of, but responsive to,
the workings of the mind of the mother. For Bion, Rosenfeld and
Winnicott, as well as those influenced by their revision of the analytic
conception of the mind of the infant, the development of the psycho-
logical life of the infant is conceived not only in terms of the indi-
vidual maturational advances of the infant, but also in terms of a
psyche jointly created by mother and infant. From this perspective,
the infant’s earliest unconscious phantasies draw on the primitively
organized mental state of the infant, on the mature psychological life
of the mother, and on the interplay between the two. So, while
Isaacs (1952) viewed attention to precise detail and to context as two
of her methodological principles of infant observation, she was not
able to include in her thinking the way in which the mother-as-
context includes not only the mother as the surround of the infant,
but also the mother as part of jointly constructed aspects of the work-
ings (the metaphorical interior) of the infant’s mind.
Phantasy as unconscious thinking
Isaacs (1952) then turns her attention to her greatly expanded concep-
tion of unconscious phantasy. I speak of Isaacs’s conception of
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phantasy, as opposed to Klein’s conception, because I believe that

Isaacs was, in many ways, a better analytic theorist than was Klein.
(Klein [1946, 1955], for example, was never able to offer a definition
of projective identification with the clarity and detail that Isaacs
brings to her definition of phantasy.) Rivière (1952), in countering
the idea that Isaacs’ understanding of phantasy was, to a large extent,
her own original contribution, stated that Isaacs’ conception of phan-
tasy “was consistently taken for granted by Klein throughout her
work” (p. 16, fn 1). I find this a telling comment. There is a vast
difference between taking an idea “for granted” and carefully, system-
atically explicating and developing an idea, garnering evidence for it,
and spelling out its implications for other aspects of analytic theory,
all of which Isaacs does in her paper.
For purposes of clarity, I will discuss separately a number of aspects
of what I see as original and groundbreaking in Isaacs’ contribution.
In reality, these “aspects” are inseparable parts of a whole. What for
Freud were “ ‘mental mechanisms’ – by which impulses and feelings
are controlled and expressed” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 78) are, for Isaacs,
“particular sorts of phantasy” (p. 78). This understanding of the role
of phantasy (more accurately, phantasying) in unconscious psycho-
logical life constitutes a turning point in the development of analytic
theory. Isaacs conceives of all “mental processes” and “mental mech-
anisms” as forms of unconscious phantasying. In other words “mental
operations” and “mechanisms” are not impersonal operations akin to
the production of insulin by specialized cells in the pancreas in
response to changes in blood sugar levels; rather, the various “mental
mechanisms,” such as the defense mechanisms described by Anna
Freud (1936), are now to be viewed as personal psychological crea-
tions: “particular sorts of phantasy” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 78) that are
unique to each individual.
For me, Isaacs’ phrase “particular sorts of phantasy” constitutes at
once a brilliant insight and the unfinished theoretical work of her
paper. Isaacs’ idea that mental mechanisms and operations are specific
(unconscious) personal phantasies, to my mind, constitutes a transition
from the “Freud–Klein era” to the “Winnicott–Bion era” of psycho-
analysis (Ogden, 2010). In the “Freud–Klein era,” the focus of
psychoanalysis is primarily on understanding what we think (the
symbolic content of unconscious thoughts, as reflected, for example,
in dreams, play, and the analysand’s associations). In the “Winnicott–
Bion era,” the primary focus is on the ways we think (our various forms
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of thinking and our inability to think, which are reflected, for example,
in dreaming, playing, and imagining, as well as in the psychotic state
of not being able to think). (Clearly, the emphasis of the latter “era”
does not replace that of the earlier one; it supplements it.) This tran-
sitional function of Isaacs’ paper constitutes, for me, the principal
importance of the paper despite the fact that I do not believe that
Isaacs was fully aware (perhaps not at all aware) of this implication of
her work. Isaacs’ (1952) use of language reflects the way in which she
has one foot in each of the two “eras” of psychoanalysis. The fact that
Isaacs uses the noun phantasy far more often than she uses the phrase
phantasy activity (and rarely uses the verb phantasying) reflects her tie to
the earlier era; on the other hand, her repeated use of the term phan-
tasy activity, though a nominative phrase, reflects her expansion of the
term phantasy to include not only mental content, but also uncon-
scious mental action (i.e. thinking).
Having reconceived mental processes and mechanisms as uncon-
scious phantasy activity, Isaacs, in a second major expansion of the
concept of phantasy, focuses on a pivotal aspect of the practice of
child and adult analysis: “the transference situation” (Isaacs, 1952,
p. 78). “[T]he patient’s relation to his analyst is almost entirely one of uncon-
scious phantasy . . . the ‘transference’ has turned out to be the chief
instrument of learning what is going on in the patient’s mind, as well
as of discovering or reconstructing his early history” (p. 79). Here
Isaacs discusses the idea that transference is phantasy, an unconscious
psychic construction based on early experience. I believe that this idea
forms the basis for an even more fundamental development in our
current understanding of transference: if transference is phantasying,
and phantasying is unconscious thinking, then transference holds
significance not simply as a symbolic expression of internal object
relationships originating in infancy and childhood. In addition, trans-
ference, as I understand it, constitutes a way of thinking for the first time
(in relation to the analyst) an emotional situation that occurred in the
past. Transference, from this perspective, is inherently more verb than
noun, that is, it comprises an effort to think disturbing experiences
with the analyst that had previously been unthinkable.
In viewing transference in this way, I am bringing aspects of
Winnicott’s work to bear on my reading of Isaacs. I am drawing on
Winnicott’s (1974) concept of “fear of breakdown” (p. 90) – fear of
psychological collapse that has already occurred much earlier in the
patient’s life (usually in infancy or childhood). When the breakdown
40
occurred, the individual was not psychologically able (even with the
help of his parents) to “encompass something” (Winnicott, 1974,
p. 91), to take in what was occurring. The breakdown that has already
occurred persists from that point on as a sense of impending psycho-
logical collapse: “the original experience of primitive agony cannot
get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own
present time experience” (Winnicott, 1974, p. 91). In the course of
analysis, it may be possible for the patient, for the first time, to expe-
rience (in the context of the safety of the analytic relationship) an
emotional event that had occurred much earlier in his life, but was
too disturbing for him to experience at the time. Transference activity,
from this perspective, is a psychological act not of reliving infantile and child-
hood experience but, rather, the opposite of repetition of early experience – it
is an act of experiencing for the first time (with the analyst and in relation to
the analyst) an emotional event that occurred in infancy or childhood, but was
impossible to experience at the time. Thus, here, and in other parts of this
paper, I find that knowledge of Winnicott’s work enhances my
reading of Isaacs no less than knowledge of Isaacs’ work enriches my
reading of Winnicott.
Phantasy as unconscious psychic reality
At this point in Isaacs’ paper, the meaning of the term phantasy has
(largely implicitly) been extended to include both unconscious
psychic content and unconscious thinking. But this is just one aspect
of Isaacs’ expansion of the meaning of the term phantasy. She now
goes on to say that Klein (and Freud) used the word phantasy to refer
to unconscious mental activity (a fact that Strachey underscored by
using the ph spelling of phantasy in the English translation). The
reality of unconscious experience has “its own objectivity as a mental
fact” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 81). In other words, psychic “reality” (the
reality of unconscious phantasy) is no less real than external reality.
Isaacs offers here a brilliantly lucid explanation of the emphasis that
Kleinians place on the reality of unconscious phantasy – it is not
“‘merely’ or ‘only’ imagined, as something unreal, in contrast with
what is actual” (p. 81).
The idea that phantasy is the psychic reality of the unconscious
leads, to my mind, to a new understanding of both phantasy and the
unconscious. Isaacs introduces her view of phantasy and unconscious
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psychic reality by means of a description of Freud’s view of the uncon-

scious: it is an “inner world of the mind [that] has a continuous living
reality of its own, with its own dynamic laws and characteristics,
different from those of the external world” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 81). I
believe that Isaacs’ rendering of Freud’s conception of the uncon-
scious suggests a further meaning of phantasy that goes beyond the
idea of phantasy as unconscious mental content and unconscious
thinking. It seems to me that Freud’s notion of the unconscious (as
viewed by Isaacs) constitutes the beginnings of the idea that phantasy
is a name given to a quality of reality that is characteristic of the
unconscious mind. What I mean by this is that phantasy might be
thought of as a way of thinking that has its own distinctive quality of
reality, a reality that we experience as different from external reality
(reality that is external to the mind, reality that we have not invented).
The experience of external reality (conscious psychic reality) would
not exist as an experience if it did not stand in tension with the expe-
rience of the unconscious psychic reality of phantasy. In other words,
the experience of the reality of external reality would not exist in the
absence of the experience, not of unreality, but of the unconscious
reality of phantasy activity. The unconscious psychic reality of phan-
tasy is a dimension of the totality of the reality of the experience of
being alive. To put it in still other terms, the unconscious psychic
reality of phastasy is that “invisible” quality of being alive out of which
dreams come and into which dreams “disappear.” From this perspec-
tive, “psychic reality” is a single experiential entity with multiple
qualities, one of which involves conscious awareness, another of
which does not. Neither quality of reality exists in isolation from the
other: the two are qualities of a unitary experience.
Phantasy, symbolic meaning and unconscious

self-reflection
Isaacs, in the 1943 version of her paper, quotes and endorses Rivière’s
(1936) definition of phantasy as “the subjective interpretation of
experience” (Isaacs, 1943a, p. 41). This conception of phantasy holds
profound significance with regard to the way one understands uncon-
scious mental life. If phantasying (unconscious thinking) is the
“subjective interpretation of experience” in both the internal and
external object worlds, phantasying necessarily involves both a
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perceiving aspect of self and an aspect of self that interprets (is capable
of rendering symbolically meaningful) what one is experiencing.
Rendering one’s experience symbolically meaningful is entirely
different from responding (e.g. fearfully or boldly) to an experience.
For example, ethologists have demonstrated that chicks only a few
days old – which have never seen any other species of animal – are
capable of differentiating between the wing patterns of predatory
birds and those of non-predators. On sighting a real or simulated
predatory wing pattern, the chicks scurry for cover (Lorenz, 1937;
Tinbergen, 1957). This constitutes an instinctual recognition of, and
response to, “a sign” in that the wing pattern holds a one-to-one
correspondence to the predatory bird. The response to a sign consti-
tutes an altogether different form of thinking from that involved in
interpreting symbols and attributing personal meanings to them (for
example, attributing personal meaning to the sight of a child waiting
at a street corner). Phantasying, for Isaacs (and for Rivière), is an
interpretive act and as such involves an interpreting subject who
mediates between what one is perceiving (for example, a real child
on a street corner or the image of a child in a dream) and the (uncon-
scious) personal symbolic meanings (i.e. the phantasies) one creates
from one’s perception.
Isaacs is very clear that phantasy and meaning are inseparable.
Phantasy is the process that creates meaning and the form in which
meaning exists in unconscious mental life:
The special character of mental as compared with physical proc-

esses is that they have meaning. Physical processes are said to have
existence, but not meaning . . . The word ‘phantasy’ serves to
remind us always of this distinctive character of meaning in the
[unconscious] mental life.
(Isaacs, 1943a, p. 272)
Having introduced the idea that unconscious phantasy involves

interpreting one’s experience, Isaacs goes on to offer a detailed
description of her conception of the way in which the infant deals
with his experience psychically:
The hungry or longing or distressed infant feels actual sensations in

his mouth or his limbs or his viscera, which mean to him that certain
things are being done to him or that he is doing such and such as
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he wishes, or fears. He feels as if he were doing so and so – e.g.

touching or sucking or biting the breast which is actually out of
reach. Or he feels as if he were being forcibly and painfully
deprived of the breast, or as if it were biting him; and this, at first,
probably without visual or other plastic images.
(1952, p. 92)
Isaacs uses the words “mean to him” and “feels as if” six times in the
space of three sentences. Isaacs, a lecturer in logic and child develop-
ment (King, 1991, p. xv), uses the utmost care and thought in her
choice of words. Her use of language, to my mind, reflects an aware-
ness of the fact that in order to generate the qualities of experience
that she is describing, there must be at least the rudiments of the
capacity for operating on the basis of the reality principle. This
impression is borne out a few paragraphs later when Isaacs states,
“The earliest phantasies . . . are bound up with an actual, however
limited and narrow, experience of objective reality” (p. 93). The
capacity to recognize external reality allows the individual to compare
one set of representations of experience with another, that is, to
compare phantasy-generated experience with the perception and
recognition of what one has not created (external reality).
To my ear, the language Isaacs uses also suggests that phantasy
activity constitutes the beginnings of conscious and unconscious
symbolic functioning in which experience is meaningful to an
interpreting/understanding subject (it “mean[s] to him”). The expe-
rience she is describing is not simply that of a psychic presentation (a
“thing in itself” [Barros and Barros, 2009]), but also, to some degree,
an experience of feeling “as if,” that is, an experience in which an
interpreting subject differentiates between one form of reality (the
reality of phantasy) and another (external reality) – this feels like that,
but is not that.
To put this in other words, in order for unconscious phantasy to
hold meaning of the sort that Isaacs is describing, it must mean some-
thing to someone who is an interpreting subject capable of differen-
tiating between symbol and symbolized, between internal and
external reality, between thought and what is being thought about.
It seems to me that phantasy activity, conceived of in this way, is the
mental activity that generates not only psychic content, unconscious
thinking, and unconscious psychic reality, but also generates a state
of consciousness in which that psychic content holds meaning for
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oneself, beginning in earliest infancy. Though Isaacs never makes this

explicit, to my mind, her conception of phantasying as an interpre-
tive activity necessarily includes in the experience of unconscious
thinking (phantasying) the beginnings of the experience of observing
oneself and thinking about oneself (which is contingent on the
capacity to experientially differentiate internal reality, external reality,
and oneself as a subject mediating between the two).
Isaacs’ (largely implicit) idea that phantasying involves unconscious
interpretation/understanding of one’s experience (both of the inner
world and external reality) anticipates Sandler’s (1976) idea that there
is not only an unconscious “dream-work,” but also an unconscious
“understanding-work,” and Grotstein’s (2000) notion that there is
not only an unconscious “dreamer who dreams the dream,” but also
an unconscious “dreamer who understands the dream.” Sandler and
Grotstein make explicit the idea that unconscious psychological work
requires a form of unconscious self-reflection, an idea that I find
implicit in Isaacs for the reasons I have stated, although she may not
have ever consciously formulated that idea in these terms.
On another front, Isaacs conceives of the unconscious as charac-
terized by the coexistence of primitive (for example, “symbolic
equation” [Segal, 1957, p. 393]) and more mature forms of thinking
and symbolizing (for example, “symbol formation proper” [Segal,
1957, p. 395]). This understanding of unconscious mental life fore-
shadows two of Bion’s most important contributions: his conception
of the healthy dialectical interplay of the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions (Bion, 1962a) and his notion of the coexistence
(in health and in psychopathological states) of the psychotic and non-
psychotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957).
Phantasy and psychic development
Another of the original contributions Isaacs makes in her discussion

of phantasy is in the area of the relationship of phantasy to the devel-
opment of the mind as a whole. As discussed earlier, Isaacs believes
that phantasy is not simply the “mental expression” of instinct. In
addition, “All impulses, all feelings, all modes of defence [much of
which presents itself in sensory/bodily form] are experienced in
phantasies which give them mental life and show their direction and
purpose” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). It seems to me that this aspect of
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Isaacs’ conception of the role of phantasy – that of transforming

sensory/bodily experience into elements of “mental life” –
anticipates Bion’s (1962b) concept of alpha function. Alpha function
is an as yet unknown set of mental operations (a form of thinking)
that transforms raw sense impressions into elements of experience
(alpha-elements) that can be linked in the process of dreaming,
which, for Bion (1962a), is synonymous with unconscious thinking.
For Isaacs (1952), instinct – a bodily event that is experienced at first
in sensory form – must undergo a transformation before being “expe-
rienced as phantasies which give them mental life” (p. 83). While
Isaacs does not name that transformative function, her concept of
phantasy activity is, I believe, akin to Bion’s alpha function, i.e.
phantasying is a mental function (a form of thinking) that transforms
sense impressions associated with instinct into a mental form that can
be linked to create personal, psychological meaning. An important
difference between Isaacs’ concept of phantasying and Bion’s alpha
function lies in the fact that, for Isaacs, the raw sense impressions that
are transformed derive largely from instinct, while, for Bion (1962a),
the raw sense impressions derive from lived emotional experience in
the internal and external world.
Isaacs, without calling attention to it, makes use of her descriptions
and interpretations of early infantile mental life to demonstrate the
role of phantasying in still other forms of psychological development,
including self–object differentiation. On the basis of infant observa-
tion and the data drawn from child analysis, Isaacs offers examples of
what she hypothesizes to be the earliest phantasy experiences of the
infant:
When the child shows his desire for his mother’s breast, he experi-
ences this desire as a specific phantasy – ‘I want to suck the nipple’.
If desire is very intense (perhaps on account of anxiety), he is likely
to feel: ‘I want to eat her all up.’
(Isaacs, 1952, p. 84)
Isaacs makes clear that while she is describing this phantasy in

words, the infant’s phantasies emerge from what W. C. M. Scott calls
the “primary whole of experience, which is that of sucking-sensing-
feeling-phantasying” (Scott’s response to Isaacs’ 1943 paper, quoted
in Isaacs, 1952, p. 93, fn 2).
In this and many other passages, Isaacs points out that
46
these early mental processes [phantasies] have an omnipotent char-

acter . . . the child in his earliest days not only feels: ‘I want to’, but
implicitly phantasies: ‘I am doing’ this and that to his mother; ‘I
have her inside me’, when he wants to. The wish . . . tends to be
felt as actually fulfilling itself whether with an external or an
internal object.
(1952, p. 85)
But, at the same time, the wish is felt to be unfulfilled – as

measured by the infant’s nascent awareness of hunger, emptiness,
loneliness, fear, and so on. In other words, the infant bumps up
against external reality and the limits of his omnipotent thinking.
What is striking here is the simultaneity of two forms of thinking:
omnipotent phantasying and thinking that recognizes the need to
work with external reality (to think in the terms of non-magical,
causal relationships presented by external reality). Even in the act of
thinking omnipotently, there is a strong sense of “I-ness” and other-
ness in Isaacs’ depiction of early phantasy activity. We find here a
hallmark of Isaacs’ thinking about the complexity inherent to the
nature of phantasy: phantasy from the outset, in one sense, involves
subject–object differentiation – “‘I am doing’ this and that to his
mother.” But, at the same time, in another sense, since the early
phantasies are omnipotent in nature, they necessarily involve poor
differentiation of self and object – the object is an extension of the
subject, and so the object will do whatever the subject wants it to do.
In its earliest days, the infant’s “own wishes and impulses fill the
whole world” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 85). To lose sight of either aspect of
this set of dialectically constituted experiences of self and object – the
experience of differentiated self and object and the experience of
undifferentiated self and object – is to lose touch with the sophistica-
tion of Isaacs’ thinking regarding forms of object relating mediated
by phantasy activity that occurs in the early mental life of the infant.
Another aspect of psychic development in which phantasying
plays a central role is the increasingly complex interplay of the reality
of internal life and external reality. As I mentioned above, for Isaacs
(1952), “phantasy thinking” (p. 108) does not stand in contrast with
“reality thinking” (p. 108). Rather, phantasying always involves
subjective interpretation of experience and a capacity for thinking
informed by the reality principle: “In our view, reality-thinking cannot
operate without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies” (Isaacs,
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1952, p. 109). Phantasying always involves inextricably intertwined

“subjective” and “objective” experience:
The earliest phantasies, then, spring from bodily impulses and are
interwoven with bodily sensations and affects. They express prima-
rily an internal and subjective reality, yet from the beginning they
are bound up with an actual, however limited and narrow, experi-
ence of objective reality.
(p. 93)
Psychic development involves the creation of increasingly rich

ways in which subjective reality and objective reality are “bound up
with” one another. (I find Isaacs’ phrase “bound up with” to be
remarkable in its power to express a complex theoretical idea in ordi-
nary language.) If there were no capacity for the “experience of
objective reality,” the infant’s phantasying would not be grounded in
anything beyond itself (that is, outside of phantasy). Omnipotent
thinking would endlessly spin out of control without external reality
to put “brakes” (Winnicott, 1945, p. 153) on it. No thinking process
could “progress” in the sense of developing in a way that is informed
by the constraints of, and interplay with, reality. Psychological matu-
ration, in general, and the development of the capacity for thinking,
in particular, requires, for example, that phantasies of omnipotent
control over the breast and its supply of milk bump up against, and
be modified by, the reality of hunger (which omnipotent phantasies
cannot satisfy). In the absence of the infant’s (or adult’s) “actual . . .
experience of objective reality” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 93), no maturation
of conscious and unconscious thinking can occur.
Phantasy and knowledge of reality
Having discussed Isaacs’ conception of the interplay of subjective and

objective reality, there remains a major theoretical problem that
Isaacs must address having to do with the source of knowledge
inherent in the content of the phantasies she is attributing to the
infant. Isaacs is well aware of the problem and addresses it directly:
It has sometimes been suggested that unconscious phantasies such

as that of ‘tearing to bits’ would not arise in the child’s mind before
48
he had gained the conscious knowledge that tearing a person to

bits [by biting and tearing] would mean killing him or her. Such a
view does not meet the case. It overlooks the fact that such knowl-
edge is inherent in bodily impulses as a vehicle of instinct, in the aim
of instinct, in the excitation of the organ, i.e. in this case, the
mouth.
(1952, pp. 93–94)
Isaacs is not proposing that knowledge of the workings of the

external world is present at birth (the Lamarckian fallacy); rather, that
“knowledge is inherent in bodily impulses” (Isaacs, 1952, p. 94). I
would suggest that Isaacs is here adumbrating developments in
linguistics, most prominently Chomsky’s (1957, 1968) notion of the
deep structure of language. Chomsky proposes that we do not inherit
the capacity for speech, but we do inherit, in biological form, the
deep structure of language which serves to organize sensory experi-
ence (the perception of the sounds of speech) into a language that has
a grammatical structure and the potential to be used to create verbally
symbolic speech as well as the capacity for reading and writing. Freud
(1916–17), like Isaacs, proposes that there is a set of universal “primal
phantasies” (pp. 370–371) (for example, the threat of castration and
the seduction of children). But neither Freud nor Isaacs could account
for the way in which the knowledge of external reality that is inherent
in “primal phantasies” and “bodily impulses” is acquired in the
absence of experience in the real world.
From a structuralist vantage point, it becomes quite plausible that
“knowledge” (for example, the idea that tearing a person to bits with
one’s mouth will kill him or her) is inherent in bodily impulses, that
is, in instincts that are constituted in part by a deep structure
(templates) that serves to organize experience along particular lines.
For example, for an infant or a small child, a bowel movement
thrown away in a diaper by the mother or flushed down the toilet
may serve as sensory (visual, tactile, olfactory, kinaesthetic, and audi-
tory) forms lending themselves to be organized in terms of a biolog-
ically determined psychic template: the phantasy of the loss of a body
part. Human beings are born with innumerable psychic templates
with which experience is organized. For example, the wavelengths
of light are organized by the brain into clusters that we see as different
colors, even though there is no such grouping inherent in the
evenly distributed range of wavelengths of light reaching the retina
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(Bornstein, 1975). Isaacs’ (as well as Freud’s and Klein’s) conception

of phantasy seems to me to require a concept analogous to that of the
deep structure of language in order to account for the universality of
specific constellations of meanings (such as the Oedipus complex)
which are integral parts of the psychoanalytic conception of universal
human experience (Ogden, 1986).
Phantasy and the need to know
Isaacs’ conception of phantasying is deeply rooted in Klein’s (1930)

concept of the epistemophilic instinct and in the relation of that
impulse to symbol formation. (Isaacs makes specific reference to “the
epistemophilic impulse” [p. 304] in the 1943 version of her paper,
but, puzzlingly, does not do so in the 1952 version.) In the final
portion of her 1952 paper, Isaacs develops the idea that the symbolic
function of phantasy “builds a bridge from the inner world to interest
in the outer world and knowledge of physical objects and events”
(1952, p. 110). Phantasying promotes and sustains “the development
of interest in the external world and the process of learning about it”
(p. 110). “The power to seek out and organize knowledge [of the
external world] is drawn” (p. 110) from phantasy activity. So, it could
be said that, for Isaacs, a major force driving phantasy activity (uncon-
scious thinking) is the need to get to know the real world, both
external and internal, and one’s relation to it. Phantasy is a principal
vehicle for what Saul Bellow (2000) calls that “deep human need . . .
for reading reality – the impulse to put your loving face to it and
press your hands against it” (p. 203).
Bion (1962a, 1962b, 1970) develops Klein’s idea of the epistemo-
philic impulse and Isaacs’ idea that phantasy (unconscious thinking)
is inherently knowledge-seeking into an idea that the human need to
know the truth of one’s experience is the primary impetus for
thinking. A “sense of reality matters to the individual in the way that
food, drink, air and excretion of waste products matter” (Bion,
1962a, p. 42). Unconscious thinking (“phantasy activity,” in Isaacs’
terms; “dreaming,” in Bion’s terms) is inherently directed toward
bringing reality to bear on the process of coming to terms with one’s
emotional problems: “without [unconscious] phantasies and without
dreams, you have not the means with which to think out your prob-
lems” (Bion, 1967, p. 25). Here, Bion makes explicit the idea that
50
phantasying (unconscious thinking) underlies the psychological

capacity to cope with one’s emotional problems.
In sum, phantasying – from the vantage point of human psychology
colored by epistemophilic (truth-seeking) needs – is not simply an
effort to manage the tension of excess sexual and destructive impulses;
in addition, phantasying is a form of thinking aimed at coming to
understandings necessary for solving the emotional problems gener-
ated in response to lived emotional experience. This conception of
unconscious phantasy activity is a highly “personal” theory of psycho-
logical development in that phantasying is seen as an attempt to get
to know the truth of one’s experience, an activity that involves
developing personal, idiosyncratic ways of being curious, different
sorts of getting to know, forms of doing something with what one is
learning, and individual ways of using what one is coming to under-
stand in the process of becoming who one is.
Isaacs’ and Fairbairn’s differing conceptions of phantasy
I find that Isaacs’ conception of phantasy is clarified by comparing it

with Fairbairn’s (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of Fairbairn’s work).
The term “object relations theory” is commonly used in a way that
encompasses both Klein’s and Fairbairn’s work. It seems to me that
to do so conflates radically different conceptions of the internal object
world and of the role of phantasy in that “inner world.” Fairbairn
(1943a) responded to Isaacs’ paper in a letter read at the Second
Discussion Meeting:
I cannot refrain from voicing the opinion that the explanatory

concept of ‘phantasy’ has now been rendered obsolete by the
concepts of ‘psychical reality’ and ‘internal objects’, which the
work of Mrs Klein and her followers has done so much to develop;
and in my opinion the time is now ripe for us to replace the
concept of ‘phantasy’ by a concept of ‘inner reality’ peopled by the
ego and its internal objects. These internal objects should be
regarded as having an organized structure, an identity of their
own, an endopsychic existence, and an activity [a capacity for
thinking and feeling] as real within the inner world as those of any
objects in the outer world. To attribute such features to internal
objects may at first seem startling to some; but, after all, they are
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only features which Freud has already attributed to the superego

[in “Mourning and melancholia,’ Freud, 1917a]. What has now
emerged is simply that the superego is not the only internal object
[i.e. split-off portion of the ego].
(Fairbairn, 1943a, pp. 359–360)
For Fairbairn, the internal object world is not a world constituted

by phantasy (“which is an ideational process” [Fairbairn, 1943a,
p. 359]). Internal objects are not ideas – they are split-off parts of the
ego with which the internal world is “peopled” (a striking word
choice on Fairbairn’s part). Internal object relationships are actual
interpersonal relationships between split-off and repressed sub-
organizations of the self (ego) (Fairbairn, 1944) (see Ogden, 1983,
and Chapter 4 for discussions of Fairbairn’s conception of internal
object relationships). These relationships are not phantasied relation-
ships, they are “as real within the inner world as those of any objects
in the outer world” (Fairbairn, 1943a, p. 359). Fairbairn, I believe,
would say that people in “the outer world” do not phantasize their
object relationships, they engage in them and experience them –
which is also the case for the objects that “people” the unconscious
inner world. “The concept of ‘phantasy’ is purely functional”
(Fairbairn, 1943a, p. 360), that is, phantasying is an ego function: an
activity of the main body of the ego/self (which Fairbairn [1944] calls
the central ego) and its split-off and repressed sub-organizations. I
would put the central difference between Isaacs and Fairbairn
regarding phantasy and internal objects in the following terms: For
Isaacs, internal objects are the product of phantasying; for Fairbairn, phanta-
sying is the product of internal objects (i.e. internal objects are the thinkers
doing the unconscious thinking).
Fairbairn and Isaacs differ in their understanding of phantasy in
another important respect. Though Isaacs broadens the concept of
phantasy to include not simply giving mental representation to
instinctual impulses, but also giving mental representation to other
types of experience, there remains in her work a strong emphasis on
instinct as the principal source (beginning in earliest infancy) of
unconscious desires, impulses, feeling states, and ways of organizing
and understanding one’s experience in the internal and external
world. By contrast, for Fairbairn (1944), instinct-driven phantasying
is not the principal source of the infant’s response to lived experience
with the mother (and the rest of external reality); rather, the infant’s
52
first encounter with the world is his response to the real mother (who
is inevitably both a satisfactory and an unsatisfactory object). The
infant’s experience of emotional deprivation is a real experience, not
a phantasy (for even the best of mothers sometimes misreads her
infant, at other times withdraws emotionally, and at still other times
exhausts her capacity to meet her infant’s needs).
Isaacs’ (1943b) reply to Fairbairn at the Discussion Meetings was
terse and dismissive:
Dr. Fairbairn, to my mind, overemphasizes and distorts certain

parts of Mrs Klein’s theories to the point of caricature. He over-
substantifies internal objects and makes them far too independent,
leaving wishes and feelings and the id generally out of account . . .
Dr. Fairbairn’s position is not to be taken as representing
Mrs Klein’s work or conclusions.
(p. 458)
Isaacs’ response to Fairbairn fails to address the theoretical problem

that Fairbairn is pointing out: if the inner world is a metaphorical
world constituted by phantasy, is the ego doing the phantasying? Or
is it the id? Or is the distinction between ego and id no longer viable?
Is Freud’s structural model a model of psychic structure that is incon-
sistent with Klein’s and Isaacs’ theories, which hold as their principal
metaphor the idea of an “inner world” of internal objects that interact
with one another?
It may be that Isaacs gave Fairbairn’s response further thought after
the Controversial Discussions and after the publication of his paper,
“Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-relationships”
(1944). Isaacs added a chapter note to the 1952 version of her paper
in which she quotes Freud’s comment that “one must not take the
difference between ego and id in too hard-and-fast a sense” (Freud,
1923, quoted in Isaacs, 1952, p. 120). Perhaps this represents a move-
ment on Isaacs’ part in the direction of Fairbairn’s idea that the id and
ego are a single entity – the subject impelled by his needs and desires.
If one adopts this position, the structural model collapses into a
real internal object relationship between two unconscious sub-
organizations of the self: the ego and a split-off part of the ego (the
superego). The movement from Freud’s structural model to a model
of internal object relationships structured by phantasy seems to me to
be a necessary implication of Isaacs’ and Klein’s work, but it is an
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implication that Isaacs seems to actively resist, perhaps for reasons

having to do with the psychoanalytic politics of her time.
Concluding comments
Isaacs’ conception of phantasy served, and still serves, as a transition

from the “Freud–Klein era” of psychoanalysis in which emphasis is
placed on the meaning of thoughts (what we think) to the “Winnicott–
Bion era” in which emphasis is placed on the way we think. Isaacs had
one foot in each of these eras. The principal importance of Isaacs’
paper, it seems to me, is to be found in her idea that phantasy is the
process that creates meaning, and is the form in which all meanings
– including feelings, defense “mechanisms,” impulses, bodily experi-
ences, and so on – exist in unconscious mental life. In addition to this
fundamental way of re-conceiving human “inner life,” I find that
there are in Isaacs’ work other important implications for a revised
theory of thinking that are left to the reader to develop. My own
extensions of Isaacs’ ideas include (1) the idea that phantasying gener-
ates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the
entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is
a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first
time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the
past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they
occurred; and (3) the idea that a principal aim and function of
phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to understand the truth
of one’s experience.
54
4
Why read Fairbairn?
I have found that Fairbairn develops a model of the mind that incor-
porates into its very structure a conceptualization of early psychic
development that is not found in the writing of any other major
twentieth-century analytic theorist. Fairbairn replaces Freud’s (1923)
structural model/metaphor of the mind with a model/metaphor in
which the mind is conceived of as an “inner world” (Fairbairn,
1943b, p. 67) in which split-off and repressed parts of the self enter
into stable, yet potentially alterable, object relationships with one
another. The “cast of characters” (that is, sub-organizations of the
personality) constituting Fairbairn’s internal object world is larger
than the triumvirate of Freud’s structural model and provides what I
find to be a richer set of metaphors with which to understand (1)
certain types of human dilemmas, particularly those based on the fear
that one’s love is destructive; and (2) the central role played by feel-
ings of resentment, contempt, disillusionment and addictive “love”
in structuring the unconscious mind.
To my mind, Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relations consti-
tutes one of the most important contributions to the development of
analytic theory in its first century. Yet, judging from the scarcity of
references to his work in the analytic literature, particularly in North
American and Latin American writing, his theoretical ideas (for
example, ideas that he introduced in his 1940, 1941, 1943b and 1944
papers) and his clinical thinking (which he presented in his 1956 and
1958 papers) have attracted far less interest and study than have other
major twentieth-century analytic theorists such as Klein, Winnicott
and Bion. In part this is due to the fact that Fairbairn worked in isola-
tion in Edinburgh. He had little opportunity for personal involve-
ment or intellectual exchange with colleagues at the Institute of
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Psychoanalysis in London whose members, in his era, included Balint,

Bion, Anna Freud, Heimann, Klein, Milner, Rosenfeld, Segal, and
Winnicott (Sutherland, 1989). Consequently, exposure to his work,
even for his contemporaries, was almost entirely through his writing.
Fairbairn’s relatively marginal place in psychoanalysis today also
derives, I believe, from the fact that the reader who undertakes the
study of Fairbairn finds himself confronted by a dense prose style, a
highly abstract form of theorizing and a set of unfamiliar theoretical
terms (for example, dynamic structure, endopsychic structure, central
ego, internal saboteur, libidinal ego, exciting object, rejecting object,
and so on) that have not been adopted by subsequent analytic theo-
rists. Though Fairbairn’s terminology is little used currently, his ideas
have had considerable impact on the thinking of leading analytic
theorists including Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Grotstein (1994),
Guntrip (1968), Kernberg (1980), Klein (1946), Kohut (1971),
Modell (1968), Rinsley (1977), Scharff and Scharff (1994), Sutherland
(1989) and Symington (1986). It is beyond the scope of this paper to
explore the ways in which these authors have critiqued, modified
and extended Fairbairn’s thinking.
In this paper, it is not my intention simply to offer an explication and
clarification of Fairbairn’s thinking; rather, in the process of looking
closely at Fairbairn’s work (particularly his papers “Schizoid factors in
the personality” [1940] and “Endopsychic structure considered in terms
of object-relationships” [1944]), I develop what I believe to be several
important implications and extensions of his thinking. I attempt to
make something of my own with Fairbairn’s writings, in part by means
of a close reading of his texts, and in part by clinically illustrating how
Fairbairn’s ideas have shaped, and evolved in, my own analytic work.
Elements of Fairbairn’s revision of psychoanalytic theory
For Fairbairn, the most difficult and most psychically formative

psychological problem that the infant or child faces is the dilemma
that arises when he experiences his mother (upon whom he is utterly
dependent) as both loving and accepting of his love, and unloving and
rejecting of his love. Fairbairn’s writing contains a critical ambiguity
concerning this core human dilemma. The language that Fairbairn
uses repeatedly raises in the reader’s mind the questions: Is every infant
traumatized by experiences of deficits in his mother’s love for him?
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Why read Fairbairn?
Or does the infant misinterpret inevitable (and necessary) frustrations

as manifestations of his mother’s failure to love him? There is ample
evidence in Fairbairn’s work to support both conclusions. For instance,
in support of the idea that the infant responds to privation as if it were
willful rejection on the part of the mother, Fairbairn writes:
Here it must be pointed out that what presents itself to him [the
infant or child] from a strictly conative standpoint as frustration at
the hands of his mother presents itself to him in a very different
light from a strictly affective standpoint. From the latter stand-
point, what he experiences is a sense of lack of love, and indeed
emotional rejection on his mother’s part.
(Fairbairn, 1944, pp. 112–113)
At the same time, there is a persistent logic in Fairbairn’s work that

supports the idea that every infant realistically perceives the limits of
his mother’s capacity to love him and that this realistic perception is
“traumatic” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 110) for the infant or child. This logic
goes as follows: (1) “[E]verybody without exception must be regarded
as schizoid” (Fairbairn, 1940, p. 7), that is, everyone evidences patho-
logical splitting of the self; individuals differ from one another only in
the severity of their schizoid pathology; (2) Schizoid psychopathology
has its origins in an “unsatisfactory” (Fairbairn, 1940, p. 13) relation-
ship with the mother, i. e. there is a “failure on the part of the mother
to convince the child that she really loves him as a person” (p. 13); (3)
Since everyone is schizoid, and the schizoid condition derives from
maternal failure to convince the infant of her love, it follows that
every infant experiences traumatizing maternal failure to love. But the
language used in this logical sequence leaves open an important ambi-
guity. Does “failure on the part of the mother to convince the child
that she really loves him as a person” (Fairbairn, 1940, p. 13) reflect
the mother’s failure to be convincing, or does it reflect the child’s
failure/inability to be convinced, that is, the child’s inability to accept
love? The clause “failure on the part of the mother,” to my ear, leans
in the direction of the former interpretation, but by no means rules
out the latter. Overall, in Fairbairn’s work, ambiguity of language in
this connection serves to convey what I believe to be Fairbairn’s view
that every infant or child accurately perceives the limits of the moth-
er’s ability to love him; and, at the same time, every infant or child
misinterprets inevitable privations as the mother’s lack of love for
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him. From this vantage point, Fairbairn’s conception of early psychic

development is a trauma theory in which the infant, to varying
degrees, is traumatized by his realistic perception that he is fully
dependent on a mother whose capacity to love him has passed its
breaking point. (To my mind, Fairbairn’s and Klein’s object relations
theories are complementary, and this complementarity creates the
opportunity for us, as analysts, to think/see with “binocular vision”
[Bion, 1962a, p. 86]. Fairbairn believes in the primacy of external
reality and the secondary role of unconscious phantasy, while Klein
believes in the primary role of unconscious phantasy and the secondary
effect of external reality. [Space does not allow for an elaboration of
the comparison of Fairbairn’s and Klein’s object relations theories.])
Fairbairn (1944) states that the infant’s subjective sense that his
mother, upon whom he depends utterly, is unable to love him gener-
ates “an affective experience which is singularly devastating”
(p. 113). For an older child, the experience of loving the mother
who is experienced as unloving and unaccepting of his love is one of
“intense humiliation” (p. 113). “At a somewhat deeper level (or at an
earlier stage) the experience is one of shame over the display of needs
which are disregarded or belittled” (p. 113). The child “feels reduced
to a state of worthlessness, destitution or beggardom” (p. 113). “At
the same time his sense of badness [for demanding too much] is
further complicated by the sense of utter impotence” (p. 113).
But, the pain of the feelings of shame, worthlessness, beggardom,
badness and impotence is not the most catastrophic consequence of
the infant’s dependence on a mother whom he experiences as
unloving and unaccepting of his love. Even more devastating is the
threat to the infant’s very existence that is posed by that relationship:
At a still deeper level (or at a still earlier stage) the child’s experience
is one of, so to speak, exploding ineffectively and being completely
emptied of libido. It is thus an experience of disintegration and of
imminent psychical death . . . [In being] threatened with loss of his
libido [love] (which for him constitutes his own goodness) . . . [he
is threatened by the loss of what] constitutes himself.
(Fairbairn, 1944, p. 113)
In other words, a universal part of earliest post-natal human exist-

ence is the terrifying experience of imminent loss of one’s self, loss of
one’s life. What is more, the infant or child
58
Why read Fairbairn?
feels that the reason for his mother’s apparent lack of love towards
him is that he has destroyed her affection and made it disappear. At
the same time he feels that the reason for her apparent refusal to
accept his love is that his own love is destructive and bad.
The infant persists in his love of “bad objects” (Fairbairn, 1943b,

p. 67) because bad objects are better than no objects at all: “he [the
infant or child] needs them [maternal objects] . . . he cannot do
without them” (Fairbairn, 1943b, p. 67). Hence, the infant cannot
abandon his attempts to reestablish a loving tie to the unloving and
unaccepting mother. The infant, in clinging to the unloving mother,
is attempting to undo the imagined toxic effects of his own love. But
if the infant persists too long in attempting to wring love from the
unloving mother, he will suffer “disintegration and . . . imminent
psychical death” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 113).
From this vantage point, the most important (life-sustaining) task
faced by the infant is not simply that of establishing and maintaining a
loving tie with the mother who is capable of giving and receiving love.
At least as important to the psychical survival of the infant is his capacity
to extricate himself from his futile efforts to wring love from the external
object mother who is experienced as unloving. The infant achieves this
life-saving psychological maneuver by developing an internal object
world (an aspect of mind) in which the relationship with the external
unloving mother is transformed into an internal object relationship.
The infant incorporates the breast in order to control it: “relation-
ships with internalized objects, [are relationships] to which the individual is
compelled to turn in default of a satisfactory relationship with objects in the
outer world” (Fairbairn, 1941, p. 40). In replacing a real external object
relationship with an internal one, the infant staunches the hemor-
rhaging of libido (his “nascent love” [Fairbairn, 1944, p. 113]) into
an emotional vacuum (the mother who, for real and imagined
reasons, is experienced as unloving). By creating an internal object
relationship with the unloving mother, the infant directs his nascent
object love toward an internal object, an object that is a part of
himself. (Every aspect of one’s mind – including all of the “internal-
ized figures” constituting one’s internal object world – is necessarily
an aspect of oneself.)
For Fairbairn, an internal object relationship constitutes a real rela-
tionship between aspects of the ego. The meaning of the term ego, as
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Fairbairn uses it, is better conveyed by the term self since all the split-
off “parts” of “the ego” are sub-organizations of the self. Fairbairn
(1943b) drops the term id from his lexicon because he views one’s
impulses and passions as integral parts of the ego/self. In discussing
Fairbairn’s ideas, I will use the terms ego and self interchangeably.
Fairbairn (1943b, 1944) reminds the reader again and again that to
conceive of internal object relationships as relationships between a
pair of split-off parts of the ego is to do nothing more than to elabo-
rate on Freud’s (1917a) conception of the creation of the “critical
agency” (p. 248) (later to be called the superego). In “Mourning and
melancholia,” Freud (1917a) describes the process by which two
parts of the ego are split off from the main body of the ego (the “I”)
and enter into an unconscious relationship with one another. In
melancholia, a part of the self (which harbors feelings of impotent
rage toward the abandoning object) enters into a stable internal object
relationship with another split-off part of the ego (which is identified
with the abandoning object). In this way, an actual unconscious
object relationship between different aspects of the self is established
and maintained. The upshot of this splitting of the ego, in Freud’s
view, is an unconscious feeling that one has not lost the object since
the abandoning object has been replaced by a part of oneself. Thus,
Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relationships represents both an
elaboration of Freud’s thinking (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the
origins of object relations theory in “Mourning and melancholia”)
and a radical departure from it (in his understanding of endopsychic
structure and the nature of internal object relationships).
Having discussed the infant’s replacement of unsatisfactory external
object relationships with internal ones, I will now turn to Fairbairn’s
conception of the internal object world (“the basic endopsychic situ-
ation” [Fairbairn, 1944, p. 106]) that results from internalization of
the unsatisfactory relationship with the mother.
To understand Fairbairn’s conception of the development of the
psyche it is necessary to understand his notion of “endopsychic struc-
ture” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 120). In brief, an endopsychic structure is a
sub-organization of the self (split off from the main “body” of the
ego/self). For Fairbairn, all unconscious endopsychic structures are
split-off parts of the ego/self; and yet, he misleadingly uses the term
internal objects to refer to these split-off parts of the self, which are more
accurately termed internal subjects. Fairbairn believes that it is erro-
neous to separate “endopsychic structures” (parts of the self capable of
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Why read Fairbairn?
thinking, feeling, remembering and responding in their own distinc-

tive ways) from “psychic dynamism” (our impulses, wishes, needs and
desires). Fairbairn (1943b, 1944) differs in this regard with Freud and
Klein in that he believes that it is inaccurate to posit an aspect of the
self (the ego/I) that is devoid of impulses, wishes and desires: What is
a self devoid of desires and impulses? Similarly, the idea of desire or
impulse divorced from the self/ego/I that is desiring or feels impelled,
is, for Fairbairn, “utterly meaningless” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 95):
“‘impulses’ are inseparable from an ego structure with a definite
pattern” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 90). Note that Fairbairn specifies that the
“ego structure” has “a definite pattern.” This idea reflects his view
that each “ego structure” (that is, each aspect of the self) has its own
unique organization that defines the way it experiences and responds
to its perceptions, needs and desires. Feeling slighted, for example,
is a different experience for each ego structure (i.e. each quasi-
autonomous aspect of the self) and elicits from each ego structure
qualitatively different emotional responses (for example, feelings of
resentment, contempt, vindictiveness and so on).
In an effort to simplify and thereby gain some control over the
internalized relationship with the unloving mother, the infant engages
in a “divide et impera” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 112) maneuver. The
infant divides the unloving (internal object) mother into two parts:
the tantalizing mother and the rejecting mother. Fairbairn does not
explain how he has arrived at the idea that the infant divides his
experience of the unloving mother into tantalizing and rejecting
parts. (Why not postulate jealous and murderous parts, or poisonous
and devouring parts?) As we do with Freud’s even bolder proposal
that all human motivations are derived from the sexual instinct and
the ego (or survival) instinct (later replaced by the death instinct),
we must suspend judgment while we examine the theoretical and
clinical consequences of the author’s hypothesis.
Fairbairn (1944) proposes that an aspect of the infant’s personality
feels powerfully, uncontrollably attached to the alluring aspect of the
internal object mother, while another aspect of the infant’s personality
feels hopelessly attached to the rejecting aspect of the internal object
mother. Both parts of the infant’s psyche – the part emotionally bound
to the alluring mother and the part bound to the rejecting mother –
are “split off” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 112) from the healthy main body of
the ego (which Fairbairn terms the central ego). At the same time,
aspects of the infant’s personality that are thoroughly identified with
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the alluring and with the rejecting aspects of the mother are also split
off from the central ego. Thus, two repressed internal object relation-
ships (made up of four split-off parts of the central ego) are created: (1)
the relationship of the tantalized self (termed by Fairbairn the libidinal
ego) and the tantalizing self-identified-with-the-object (the exciting
object); and (2) the relationship of the rejected self (the internal sabo-
teur) and the rejecting self-identified-with-the-object (the rejecting
object). These two sets of internal object relationships are angrily
rejected (that is, repressed) by the central ego because the healthy
aspect of the infant’s personality (the central ego) feels intense anger at
the unloving internal object mother.
The exciting object and the rejecting object are no less parts of the
self than are the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur. The exciting
and rejecting internal “objects” have a not-me feel to them because
they are parts of the self that are thoroughly identified with the
unloving mother in her exciting and rejecting qualities (see Ogden,
1983, for a discussion of the concept of internal objects and internal
object relations).
Fairbairn (1944, 1963) believes that the internalization of the unsat-
isfactory object is a defensive measure carried out in an effort to
control the unsatisfactory object. But, to my mind, the illusory control
that the child achieves by means of this internalization only in part
accounts for the immense psychic power of the internal object world
to remain a “closed system of internal reality” (Fairbairn, 1958,
p. 385), that is, to maintain its isolation from the real world. Despite
the fact that split-off and repressed aspects of the ego (the internal
saboteur and libidinal ego) feel intense resentment toward, and feel-
ings of being callously spurned by, the unloving and unaccepting
object, Fairbairn (1944) states that the ties between these split-off parts
of the self and the internalized unloving object are libidinal in nature.
The libidinal nature of these ties suggests that aspects of the indi-
vidual (the internal saboteur and the libidinal ego) have by no means
given up on the potential of the unsatisfactory object to give and
receive love. It seems to me that a libidinal tie to an internal object
toward whom one feels anger, resentment, and the like necessarily
involves an (unconscious) wish/need to use what control one feels
one has to change the unloving and unaccepting (internal) object
into a loving and accepting one.
From this vantage point, I view the libidinal ego and the internal
saboteur as aspects of self that are intent on transforming the exciting
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Why read Fairbairn?
object and the rejecting object into loving objects. Moreover, it

seems to me, by extension of Fairbairn’s thinking, that the infant’s
effort to transform unsatisfactory objects into satisfactory objects – thus reversing
the imagined toxic effect on the mother of the infant’s love – is the single most
important motivation sustaining the structure of the internal object world.
And that structure, when externalized, underlies all pathological
object relationships.
The “emotional life” of Fairbairn’s internal objects
Fairbairn (1944, p. 105) provides a diagram depicting the relation-

ships among the psychic structures that I have just described (see
Figure 1). It has been my experience in reading and teaching Fairbairn
that a familiarity with this diagram is useful in one’s efforts to grasp
the nature of the internal object world as Fairbairn conceives it. Since
Figure 1 Relationships among the psychic structures. Adapted from Fairbairn,

1944, p. 105. Permission kindly granted by Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Key: CE, Central Ego; IS, Internal Saboteur; LE, Libidinal Ego; RO, Rejecting
Object; EO, Exciting Object; Cs, Conscious; Pcs, Preconscious; Ucs, Unconscious;
¨, Aggression; ||, Libido
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the diagram necessarily has a mechanical, non-human quality to it, in

what follows I try to convey what I believe to be the nature of the
“emotional life” of each of the internal objects constituting Fairbairn’s
internal object world.
Addictive love (the bond between the libidinal ego and the
exciting object)
As I understand Fairbairn’s theory of internal object relationships, all

the love and hate that tie internal objects to one another is inherently
pathological because it is derived entirely from the pathological tie of
the infant to the unreachable mother, that is, to the mother who is
felt to be incapable of giving and receiving love. The relationship
between the libidinal ego and the exciting object is one of addictive
“love” on the part of the libidinal ego, and of desperate need on the
part of the exciting object to elicit desire from the libidinal ego
(which desire the exciting object will never satisfy).
When I imagine the libidinal ego and the exciting object as char-
acters in an internal drama, I often think of a patient with whom I
worked many years ago in twice-weekly face-to-face psychotherapy.
The patient, Mr. C, was a man in his early thirties, with cerebral
palsy, who was desperately in love with Ms. Z, a “beautiful” woman
friend (who did not have cerebral palsy or any other physical impair-
ment). In the course of the years of this “friendship,” the patient’s
advances became more insistent and beseeching. This eventually led
Ms. Z to end the relationship altogether. Mr. C, who found it diffi-
cult to articulate words under the best of circumstances, would
bellow in pain during our sessions as he tried to talk about how much
he loved Ms. Z.
Mr. C insisted that Ms. Z must love him because she enjoyed
his sense of humor and had invited him to two parties at her
apartment. Although I only knew Ms. Z from my experience with
Mr. C (including my transference–countertransference experience), I
suspected that Ms. Z was drawn to Mr. C in an unconscious patho-
logical way. I based this suspicion, in part, on the fact that in my work
with Mr. C, I regularly had the wish not only to soothe him, but also
to “cure” him of his cerebral palsy. I came to see the latter wish as a
reflection of my own inability to appreciate and accept him as he was,
and, instead, to turn to magical solutions. To have acted on these
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Why read Fairbairn?
feelings, for example, by speaking to Mr. C in a way that implicitly

promised “cure” would have been to encourage the patient to become
utterly dependent on me for continued magical evasion of reality.
Under such circumstances, there would have been no opportunity for
Mr. C to grow and to achieve genuine maturity and independence. It
seems to me that the outcome of the analytic work depended upon
my ability to recognize, think about, and come to terms with my own
needs to keep Mr. C endlessly dependent on me.
To my mind, Mr. C’s “love relationship” with Ms. Z (and with
me in the aspect of the transference–countertransference that involved
my unconscious wish to “cure” him) was an expression of a patho-
logical mutual dependence. In Fairbairn’s terms, this emotional situ-
ation might be thought of as the tie between the libidinal ego and the
exciting object. Such relationships involve psychic bondage in which
the participants are each jailer and jailed, stalker and stalked. (I will
further discuss my work with Mr. C later in this chapter when I
address the subject of psychological growth.)
Bonds of resentment (the tie between the internal saboteur

and the rejecting object)
The relationship between the internal saboteur and the rejecting

object derives from the infant’s love of his mother despite (and
because of) her rejection of him. The nature of the pathological love
that binds together the internal saboteur and the rejecting object is a
bond not of hate, but of a pathological love that is experienced as
bitter “resentment” (Fairbairn, 1944, p. 115). Neither the rejecting
object nor the internal saboteur is willing or able to think about,
much less relinquish, that tie. In fact, there is no desire on the part of
either to change anything about their mutual dependence. The
power of that bond is impossible to overestimate. The rejecting
object and the internal saboteur are determined to nurse their feel-
ings of having been deeply wronged, cheated, humiliated, betrayed,
exploited, treated unfairly, discriminated against, and so on. The
mistreatment at the hands of the other is felt to be unforgivable. An
apology is forever expected by each, but never offered by either.
Nothing is more important to the internal saboteur (the rejected self)
than coercing the rejecting object into recognizing the incalculable
pain that he or she has caused.
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From the point of view of the rejecting object (the split-off aspect
of the self thoroughly identified with the rejecting mother), the expe-
rience of this form of pathological love involves the conviction that
the internal saboteur is greedy, insatiable, thin-skinned, ungrateful,
unwilling to be reasonable, unable to let go of a grudge, and so on.
But despite the burdensomeness of the ceaseless complaining and self-
righteous outrage of the internal saboteur, the rejecting object is both
unwilling and unable to give up the relationship, that is, to extricate
itself from the mutual pathological dependence. The life, the determi-
nation, the very reason for being of the rejecting object (as a part of
the self) is derived from its tie to the internal saboteur. The rejecting
object is an empty shell, a lost and forgotten part of the past, in the
absence of the obsession on the part of the internal saboteur to wring
love, remorse and magical reparation from it. This internal object
relationship (like the relationship of the libidinal ego and the exciting
object) is a relationship in which the jailer is a prisoner of the jailed,
and the jailed a prisoner of the jailer. Outside of the terms of their
pathological, mutually dependent “love,” neither would hold meaning
for the other or for itself (much less for any other part of the self).
In the absence of one, the other would become a mere remnant
of a once powerful pair of deities that reigned in a religion no longer
practised.
A particular clinical experience of group dynamics comes to mind
in connection with the power of the bond between the internal sabo-
teur and the rejecting object. (While Fairbairn [1944] believed that his
understanding of the psyche “provides a more satisfactory basis than
does any other type of psychology for the explanation of group
phenomena” [p. 128], he did not develop or clinically illustrate this
idea in any of his writings.) I was asked by the chairperson of a social
service agency to serve as a consultant to the psychotherapy division
of the agency. The members of the staff of the psychotherapy division
were in constant conflict with one another and with the rest of the
agency. The director of the psychotherapy division, a psychiatrist in
his early fifties, oversaw a staff of three male psychiatrists and six female
psychologists and social workers, all in their thirties and forties. The
director showed consistent favoritism toward the male psychiatrists,
not only in his praise of their ideas, but also in appointing them to
leadership positions (which paid higher salaries). The women thera-
pists, most of whom had worked in this agency for many years, made
no secret of their discontent with the director.
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Why read Fairbairn?
In the course of speaking in confidence with individual members

of the staff, I was struck by the fact that while each of the female
psychotherapists expressed intense anger and bitterness about the way
she was being treated by the director, they all felt that they had no
choice but to remain working at the clinic. They told me that psychi-
atric services at the other agencies and hospitals in the area were being
shut down, so they had no choice but to stay. But none had inter-
viewed at other hospitals or social service agencies. In my conversa-
tions with the director of the division, he spoke to me as a fellow
psychiatrist whom he believed would understand the inevitable diffi-
culty involved in working with “non-medical” female psychothera-
pists who invariably become ensnarled in “oedipal attachments and
rivalries” with one another and with the “medical” group leader.
My consultation to the clinic was ended abruptly after three
months when the city’s funding for all mental health services was cut
sharply and the psychotherapy division of this clinic was shut down.
One of the female staff members, whom I later met by chance at a
lecture, told me, “On looking back on it, I feel as if I was living as a
child in a psychotic family. I couldn’t imagine leaving and finding
other work. It felt as if I would end up living in a cardboard box if I
were to leave. My whole world had shrunk to the size of that clinic.
If the clinic hadn’t closed, I’m certain I would still be working there.”
She described the former director of the psychotherapy division as “a
very limited person who hates women and gets pleasure out of
humiliating them in a way that he feels no need to hide.” “But,” she
added, “the really frightening thing for me is that I couldn’t leave.
The situation was not only bad at work, I couldn’t stop thinking
about it at night, over the weekends, or even when I was on vaca-
tion. It was as if I was infected by the situation.”
It seems to me that all of the participants in this drama felt and
behaved as if their lives depended on the perpetuation of the tie
between the tormentor and the aggrieved. The director, the three
psychiatrists (who said they felt “caught in the middle,” but did
nothing to address the patent unfairness), and the female staff all felt
wronged. No one seemed to recognize the ways in which he or she
actively and passively provoked feelings of anger, helplessness, outrage
and resentment in the others. In retrospect, it seems to me that what
I was witnessing might be thought of as a rather intense form of the
bond of mutual dependence tying the internal saboteur and the
rejecting object to one another.
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Bonds of contempt (the relationship of the internal saboteur to the

libidinal ego and the exciting object)
For me, one of Fairbairn’s most original and most significant contri-
butions to psychoanalysis is the understanding of human nature that
emerges from his conception of the relationship between the internal
saboteur and the libidinal ego, and between the internal saboteur and
the exciting object. The internal saboteur, filled with self-hatred for
its own “dependence dictated by . . . [infantile] need” (Fairbairn,
1944, p. 115), turns on the libidinal ego, and in so doing, turns on
itself at one remove (since every internal object – every endopsychic
structure – is a subdivision of a subject who is one person). The
internal saboteur disdainfully, contemptuously attacks the libidinal
ego as a pathetic wretch, a sap, a sucker for the way it continually
humiliates itself in begging for the love of the exciting object: You
[the libidinal ego] never learn your lesson. You get kicked in the face
[by the exciting object] and drag yourself to your feet as if nothing
has happened only to get kicked and knocked down again. How can
you be so stupid as to not see what is plain as day? She [the exciting
object] toys with you, leads you on, and then dumps you every time.
And yet you keep going back for more. You disgust me.
It seems to me that from this perspective – the perspective of the
internal saboteur – we are better able to understand the sense in which
Fairbairn uses the term libidinal ego to name the aspect of self that is
tied by bonds of addictive love to the exciting object. Libido, in this
context, and in the internal object world in general, is synonymous
with narcissistic libido (narcissistic love). All internal objects (more
accurately, internal subjects) are split-off parts of the central ego/self,
and therefore the relationships among them are relationships that are
exclusively relationships with oneself. Thus, the libidinal ego is
“loving,” but only loving of itself (in the form of the exciting object).
Closely tied to the attack of the internal saboteur on the libidinal
ego is the attack of the internal saboteur on the object of that narcis-
sistic love, the exciting object. The internal saboteur views the
exciting object as a malicious tease, a seductress, a bundle of empty
promises: You [the exciting object] don’t fool me. You may be able
to make a fool of him [the libidinal ego], but I know your type, I’ve
heard your lies, I’ve seen your depraved imitations of love. You’re a
parasite; you take, but you don’t know what it means to give. You
prey on the gullible, on children.
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Why read Fairbairn?
At first blush, the internal saboteur deserves its name: it demeans

and shames the libidinal ego for its infantile longings, and attacks the
exciting object for its endless appetite for tantalizing, seducing,
deceiving and humiliating. But the contempt and disdain that the
internal saboteur feels toward the libidinal ego and the exciting object
are born of its feelings of self-hatred, impotence and shame concerning
its own naive, self-deluding, infantile pursuit of the love of the
rejecting object (for example, in the clinical example presented
earlier, the futile pursuit of the love of the director by the female
members of the therapy staff). I believe that implicit in Fairbairn’s
rendering of the structure of the internal object world is the idea that
the fury and contempt that the internal saboteur heaps upon the
libidinal ego and the exciting object stem from a glimmer of recogni-
tion of the shame and humiliation it feels about its own absolute
dependence on, and loyalty to, the rejecting (internal object) mother.
Attacks by the internal saboteur on the libidinal ego and the
exciting object may take a broad range of forms in the analytic situ-
ation. In my work with Ms. T, an analysand I saw over a period of
many years in a five-session-per-week analysis, I could do nothing
right. If I spoke, I was “missing the point”; if I was quiet, I was
“being a stereotypic analyst,” spewing pronouncements from behind
the couch; if I was punctual, I was “being obsessional”; if I was a
minute late, I was “dreading” seeing her. In a session with this patient
in the fourth year of analysis, an image came to my mind of a home-
less man sitting on the curb near a traffic light. It seemed that he had
given up on begging, and that it would not be long before he died.
Profoundly disturbed by this image, I began to become aware of my
own feeling that for a number of months I had given up on ever
being seen by the patient for who I was, and, in return, I had given
up on trying to be an analyst to her. It was not simply that I had made
mistakes; the situation felt to me to be far worse than that: I, myself,
was the mistake. My very being was wrong for her.
An integral part of my effort to make therapeutic use of the feeling
state that I was beginning to recognize and put into words for myself
involved thinking of myself as having experienced something like
the patient’s feeling that her very way of being was wrong (a far
worse problem than feeling that she had made a great many serious
errors). (Fairbairn [1944] notes that in the world of unconscious
internal object relationships, feeling guilty about one’s failures and
misdeeds is far preferable to feeling “unconditionally, i.e. libidinally
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bad” [p. 93]. To feel unconditionally bad is to feel that one’s love is
bad.) I eventually said to Ms. T, “For a long time, you have been
telling me that I simply cannot understand you and that virtually
everything I say confirms that. I don’t think you’ve been any harsher
with me than you are with yourself. In fact, I think that your attacks
on yourself are far more violent than your attacks on me. I think that
you feel not only that everything you do is wrong, you firmly believe
that your very existence is wrong and that the only thing you can do
to remedy that situation is to become another person. Of course, if
you were to succeed in doing so, you would be dead: worse than
that, you would never have existed.”
Ms. T responded immediately by saying that I was being very
wordy. As she said this, I felt deflated and realized that despite years
of experience with this patient, I had actually expected that this time
she would at least consider what I had said. I told this to the patient
and after a few moments of silence, she said, “Please don’t give up on
me.” In Fairbairn’s terms, the patient, at least for this moment, had
softened her intrapsychic attack on herself (the attack of the internal
saboteur on the libidinal ego for its way of loving). She allowed
herself not only to accept her dependence on me, but also to ask
something of me (as a separate person) that she knew she could not
provide for herself.
The relationship of the central ego to internal and external objects
Before ending the discussion of the emotional life of internal objects/

endopsychic structures, I will comment very briefly on Fairbairn’s
concept of the central ego. The central ego is the aspect of the psyche
that Fairbairn fleshes out least. What Fairbairn (1944) does say is that
the central ego is an endopsychic structure capable of thinking,
feeling, responding, and so on. It constitutes the original healthy self
of the newborn infant. From the outset, the central ego of the infant
is capable of rudimentary self–object differentiation and of operating
on the basis of the reality principle. But in response to a traumatizing
experience with a mother whom the infant experiences as both
loving and accepting of his love, and unloving and rejecting of his
love, the infant splits off parts of the central ego and represses them
in the form of the internal object relationships that I have described.
Consequently, the central ego retains its original health, but is
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Why read Fairbairn?
significantly depleted by the process of splitting off and “sending into

exile” (repressing) parts of itself.
The central ego is the only part of the self that is able to engage in,
and learn from, experience with external objects. Change in the
unconscious internal object world is always mediated by the central
ego (which sometimes acts in concert with external objects such as
the analyst). Internal objects interact with the external world only in
the form of narcissistic object relationships – that is, externalizations
of internal object relationships (which are necessarily narcissistic in
nature). The central ego includes no dynamically repressed (unsatis-
factory) internal object relationships; rather, the central ego consists
exclusively of good enough (as opposed to idealized) object relation-
ships such as identifications with people whom one has loved and by
whom one has felt loved, recognized and accepted. Such identifica-
tions underlie feelings that include a sense of internal security, as well
as background feelings of solidity and integrity.
Psychological growth
In the final section of this paper, I will discuss some of the ways in
which a person may be helped to grow psychologically. Fairbairn
regards as “relatively immutable” (1944, p. 129) the “basic endopsy-
chic situation,” i.e. the constellations of split-off and repressed aspects
of the central ego. For Fairbairn, the psychological changes that can
be achieved through psychoanalysis primarily involve diminutions of
the intensity of the feelings of resentment, addictive love, contempt,
primitive dependence, disillusionment, and so on that bind the split-
off, repressed sub-organizations of the self to one another. Specifically,
healthy psychological change can be achieved by reducing to a
minimum:
(a) the attachment of the subsidiary egos [the internal saboteur and
the libidinal ego] to their respective associated objects [the rejecting
object and the exciting object], (b) the aggression of the central
ego towards the subsidiary egos and their objects [which takes the
form of repression of the two pairs of split-off parts of the self], and
(c) the aggression of the internal saboteur towards the libidinal ego
and its object [the exciting object].
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The density of the prose, the mechanical nature of the metaphors,

the level of abstraction, the heavy reliance on his own technical
terminology, together denude Fairbairn’s statement of almost anything
recognizable as human experience. I will offer an alternative way of
speaking and thinking about how people grow psychologically that
relies less on Fairbairn’s explicitly stated ideas and more on ideas that
I find to be implicit in his work. Though Fairbairn never puts it in
this way, I believe that the most fundamental psychological principle
underlying his conception of psychological growth is the idea that all
psychological maturation involves the patient’s genuine acceptance of
himself and, by extension, acceptance of others. That acceptance is
achieved by means of the work of coming to terms with the full range
of aspects of oneself, including one’s disturbing, infantile, split-off
identifications with one’s unloving, unaccepting mother. Psychological
change of this sort creates the possibility of discovering a world
of people and experiences that exists outside of oneself, a world in
which it is possible to feel curious, surprised, delighted, disappointed,
homesick, and so on. The world of thought, feeling and human relat-
edness that is opened by such self-acceptance is a world in which
one feels no compulsion to transform the realities of one’s human
relationships into something other than what they are, that is, to
change oneself or “the object” (who is now a whole and separate
subject) into other people. It is also a world in which one can learn
from one’s experiences with other people because those experiences
are no longer dominated by projections of static internal object
relationships.
A particular analytic experience comes to mind in this regard. Mr.
C, the patient with cerebral palsy whom I discussed earlier, had, as a
child, been savaged by his mother. As I have described, in adult life
he became possessed by a “love” for Ms. Z. Over a period of eight
years, Ms. Z twice relocated to a different city; both times the patient
followed. Again and again, she tried to make it clear to Mr. C that
she liked him as a friend, but did not want a romantic relationship
with him. He became increasingly desperate, angry and suicidal.
From the outset of the analytic work, and frequently thereafter, the
patient told me that he did not know why I “tolerated” him.
In our sessions, Mr. C would howl in pain as he spoke of the
“unfairness” of Ms. Z’s rejection of him. When upset, particularly
when crying, the patient would lose muscular control of his mouth,
which made it very difficult for him to speak. Frothy saliva gathered
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Why read Fairbairn?
at the sides of his mouth and mucus dripped from his nose while tears
ran down his cheeks. Being with Mr. C at these times was heart-
breaking. I have only rarely felt in such an immediate, physical way
that I was the mother of a baby in distress. Mr. C seemed to want me
to help him present himself to Ms. Z in a way that would not frighten
her and would help her understand how much he loved her and how
much she loved him (if she would only admit it to herself). It was
impossible not to hear in the patient’s “plan” a wish that I transform
Ms. Z (and, unconsciously, his mother and the aspect of me that only
“tolerated” him) into people who were genuinely able to love him,
accept him and value his love.
In retrospect, I believe that it was very important to the analytic
experience that Mr. C experience for himself over a period of years
the reality that I was not repulsed by him even when he bellowed in
pain and could not control the release of tears, nasal mucus and saliva.
It must have been apparent to Mr. C, though I never put it into
words, that I loved him as I would one day love my own children in
their infancy. For years, the patient had been too ashamed to tell me
about some of the ways his mother had humiliated him as a child, for
example, by repeatedly calling him “a repulsive, slobbering monster.”
He only gradually entrusted me with these deeply shamed aspects of
himself.
I viewed Mr. C’s accounts of his humiliating mother as a descrip-
tion not only of his external object mother, but, as importantly, a
description of an aspect of himself that viewed himself as an object of
contempt and which enlisted others (most prominently Ms. Z) to
humiliate him. A humiliating connection with Ms. Z was uncon-
sciously felt to be far better than no connection at all.
Several years into the work, Mr. C told me a dream: “Not much
happened in the dream. I was myself with my cerebral palsy, washing
my car and enjoying listening to music on the car radio that I had
turned up loud.” The dream was striking in a number of ways. It was
the first time, in telling me a dream, that Mr. C specifically mentioned
his cerebral palsy. Moreover, the way that he put it – “I was myself
with my cerebral palsy” – conveyed a depth of recognition and an
acceptance of himself that I had never before heard from him. How
better could he have expressed a particular type of change in his rela-
tionship to himself – a psychological change that involved a loving
self-recognition that contributed to freeing him from the need to
perpetually attempt to wring love and acceptance from those internal
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and external objects who were least inclined to, or incapable of,
loving him? In the dream, he was able to be a mother who took
pleasure in bathing her baby (his car) while listening to and enjoying
the music that was coming from inside the baby. This was not a
dream of triumph; it was an ordinary dream of ordinary love:
“nothing much happened.”
I was deeply moved by the patient’s telling me his dream. I said to
him, “What a wonderful dream that was.”
Some years later, Mr. C moved to another part of the country to
take a high-level job in his field. He wrote to me periodically. In the
last letter I received from him (about five years after we stopped
working together), he told me that he had married a woman he
loved, a woman who had cerebral palsy. They had recently had a
healthy baby girl.
Mr. C, in the context of the developing relationship with me, was
able to extricate himself from his addictive love of Ms. Z (a bond
between the libidinal ego and the exciting object) while at the same
time diminishing his compulsive engagement in forms of relatedness
based on the bond between the debasing and the debased aspects of
himself (the bond between the internal saboteur and the libidinal
ego).
It seems to me that a key element of the therapeutic action of the
work that Mr. C and I did together was the real (as opposed to the
transferential) relationship between the two of us (for example, in
my genuinely not feeling repulsed by the mucus, tears and saliva
flowing from his nose, eyes and mouth as he bellowed in pain, and
by my experiencing love for him of a sort that, later in my life, I
would feel for my infant sons). Fairbairn, I think, would agree with
this understanding and go a step further: “the really decisive [thera-
peutic] factor is the relationship of the patient to the analyst”
(Fairbairn, 1958, p. 379). He elaborated on this idea a bit later in the
same paper:
Psycho-analytical treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the

patient to press-gang his relationship with the analyst into the closed system
of the inner world through the agency of transference, and a determination
on the part of the analyst to effect a breach in this closed system and to
provide conditions under which, in the setting of a therapeutic relationship,
the patient may be induced to accept the open system of outer reality.
(p. 385)
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Why read Fairbairn?
Concluding comments
Psychological growth, for Fairbairn (as I read him), involves a form

of acceptance of oneself that can be achieved only in the context of
a real relationship with a relatively psychologically mature person. A
relationship of this sort (including the analytic relationship) is the
only possible exit from the solipsistic world of internal object rela-
tionships. Self-acceptance is a state of mind that marks the (never
fully achieved) relinquishment of the life-consuming effort to trans-
form unsatisfactory internal object relationships into satisfactory (that
is, loving and accepting) ones. With psychological growth, one
comes to know at depth that one’s early experiences with one’s
unloving and unaccepting mother will never be other than what they
were. It is a waste of life to devote oneself to the effort to transform
oneself (and others) into the people one wishes one were (or wishes
they were). In order to take part in experience in a world populated
by people whom one has not invented, and from whom one may
learn, the individual must first loosen the unconscious bonds of
resentment, addictive love, contempt and disillusionment that
confine him to a life lived principally in his mind.
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5
Winnicott’s “Primitive emotional
development”
Psychoanalysis in its first century has had several great thinkers, but,
to my mind, only one great English-speaking writer: Donald
Winnicott. Because style and content are so interdependent in his
writing, his papers are not well served by a thematic reading aimed
exclusively at gleaning what the paper is “about.” Such efforts often
result in trivial aphorisms. Winnicott, for the most part, does not use
language to arrive at conclusions; rather, he uses language to create
experiences in reading which are inseparable from the ideas he is
presenting – or, more accurately, the ideas he is playing with.
I offer here a reading of Winnicott’s (1945) “Primitive emotional
development,” a paper that contains the seeds of virtually all the
major contributions to psychoanalysis that Winnicott would make
over the course of the succeeding 26 years of his life. I hope to
demonstrate the interdependence of the life of the ideas being devel-
oped and the life of the writing in this seminal contribution to the
analytic literature. What Winnicott’s paper has to offer to an analytic
reader could not be said in any other way (which is to say that the
writing is extraordinarily resistant to paraphrase). It has been my
experience that an awareness of the way the language is working
significantly enhances what can be learned from reading Winnicott.
In recent years, I have found that the only way I can do justice to
studying and teaching Winnicott is to read his papers aloud, line by
line, as I would a poem, exploring what the language is doing in
addition to what it is saying. It is not an overstatement to say that a
great many passages from Winnicott’s papers well deserve to be called
prose poems. These passages meet Tom Stoppard’s (1999) definition
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Winnicott’s “Primitive emotional development”
of poetry as “the simultaneous compression of language and expan-

sion of meaning” (p. 10).
In my discussion of Winnicott’s paper, I will not be limiting myself
to an explication of the text, although many of the ideas developed
there will be discussed. My principal interest is in looking at this
paper as a piece of non-fiction literature in which the meeting of
reader and writing generates an imaginative experience in the
medium of language. To speak of Winnicott’s writing as literature is
not to minimize its value as a way of conveying ideas that have
proved to be of enormous importance to the development of psycho-
analytic theory and practice. On the contrary, my effort is to demon-
strate how the life of the writing is critical to, and inseparable from,
the life of the ideas.
Before looking closely at “Primitive emotional development,” I
will offer a few observations about Winnicott’s writing that are rele-
vant to the whole of his opus. The first quality of Winnicott’s writing
that strikes the reader is its form. Unlike the papers of any other
psychoanalyst I can think of, Winnicott’s papers are brief (usually six
to ten pages in length), often containing a moment in the middle of
the paper when he takes the reader aside and tells him, in a single
sentence, “the essential feature of my communication is this . . .”
(Winnicott, 1971b, p. 50). But the most distinctive signature of
Winnicott’s writing is the voice. It is casual and conversational, but
always profoundly respectful of both the reader and the subject matter
under discussion. The speaking voice gives itself permission to
wander, and yet has the compactness of poetry; there is an extraordi-
nary intelligence to the voice that is at the same time genuinely
humble and well aware of its limitations; it has a disarming intimacy
that at times takes cover in wit and charm; the voice is playful and
imaginative, but never folksy or sentimental.
Any effort to convey a sense of the voice in Winnicott’s writing
must locate at its core the quality of playfulness, and there is an enor-
mous range of forms of playfulness to be found. To name only a few,
there are the unselfconscious feats of imaginative, compassionate
understanding in his accounts of “squiggle games” (1971c) with his
child patients. There is serious playfulness (or playful seriousness) in
the voice when Winnicott is involved in an effort to generate a form
of thinking/theorizing that is adequate to the paradoxical nature of
human experience as he understands it. Winnicott takes delight in
subtle word play, for instance, in the repetition of a familiar phrase in
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slightly different forms, to refer to the patient’s need to begin and to

end analysis: “I do analysis because that is what the patient needs to
have done and to have done with” (1962, p. 166).
While his writing is personal, there is also a certain English
formality to the voice in Winnicott’s writing that befits the para-
doxical combination of formality and intimacy that is a hallmark of
psychoanalysis (Ogden, 1989). In terms of all of these matters of form
and voice, Winnicott’s work holds strong resemblances to the
compact, intelligent, playful, at times charming, at times ironic,
always irreducible writing of Borges’ Ficciones (1944) and Frost’s
prose and poetry.
Winnicott’s inimitable voice can be heard almost immediately in
“Primitive emotional development” as he explains his “methodology”:
I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development
of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not
work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here
and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theo-
ries and then, last of all, interest myself in looking to see where I
stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.
(p. 145)
There is playful wit to the words, “Perhaps this is as good a method

as any.” This seemingly tacked-on afterthought expresses what is
perhaps the central theme of the paper as a whole: creating “a
method,” a way of being alive, that suits the individual and becomes
his unique “watermarking” (Heaney, 1980, p. 47), is perhaps the
single most important outcome of primitive emotional development.
In the process of coming into being as an individual, the infant (and
mother) “gather this and that, here and there.” Early experience of
self is fragmented and at the same time is (with the help of the mother)
“gather[ed]” in a way that allows the infant’s experience of self, now
and again, to come together in one place. Moreover, for the infant,
the bits of others (introjects) – or, for the writer, the ideas of other
writers – must not be allowed to take over the process of creating
meaning. “My mind does not work that way,” nor does that of the
healthy infant in the care of a healthy mother. The individual’s own
lived experience must be the basis for creating coherence for oneself
and integrity of oneself. Only after a sense of self has begun to come
into being (for the infant and for the writer) can one acknowledge
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the contributions of others to the creating of oneself (and one’s ideas):

“. . . last of all [I] interest myself in where I stole what.”
Winnicott then briefly discusses several aspects of the analytic rela-
tionship, with particular emphasis on the transference–countertrans-
ference. He believes that the body of experience he has had has been
a major source of his conception of primitive emotional develop-
ment. I will examine only one brief passage (two sentences to be
precise) of Winnicott’s discussion of the transference–countertrans-
ference. I have selected these sentences because I find them to be of
enormous importance to the understanding of both Winnicott’s
conception of the workings of the analytic relationship, and the
powerful interdependence of language and ideas in his work:
The depressed patient requires of his analyst the understanding

that the analyst’s work is to some extent his effort to cope with his
own (the analyst’s) depression, or shall I say guilt and grief resultant
from the destructive elements in his own (the analyst’s) love. To
progress further along these lines, the patient who is asking for
help in regard to his primitive, pre-depressive relationship to
objects needs his analyst to be able to see the analyst’s undisplaced
and co-incident love and hate of him.
(pp. 146–147)
In the opening clause of the first of these two sentences, Winnicott

not only offers a theory of depression radically different from those of
Freud and Klein, but also proposes a new conception of the role of
countertransference in the psychoanalytic process. Winnicott is
suggesting here that depression is not, most fundamentally, a patho-
logical internalization of a narcissistically loved (and lost) object (in
an effort to evade experiencing the reality of the loss of the object)
(Freud, 1917a, 1917b; see Chapter 2). Neither does the under-
standing of depression that Winnicott is suggesting view depression
as centered around the unconscious fantasy that one’s anger has
injured, driven away or killed the loved object (Klein, 1952).
In the space of a single sentence, Winnicott suggests (by means of
his use of the idea rather than through his explication of it) that depres-
sion is a manifestation of the patient’s taking on as his own – in
fantasy, taking into himself – his mother’s depression (or that of other
loved objects) with the unconscious aim of relieving her of her
depression. What is astounding is that this conception of the patient’s
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depression is presented not through a direct statement, but by means

of a sentence that is virtually incomprehensible unless the reader does
the work of creating/discovering for himself the conception of the
intergenerational origins and dynamic structure of depression. Only
after the reader has done this work does it begin to make sense why
“The depressed patient requires of his analyst the understanding that
the analyst’s work is to some extent his effort to cope with his own
(the analyst’s) depression” (pp. 146–147).1 In other words, if the
analyst is unable to cope with his own feelings of depression (both
normative and pathological) arising from his own past and current
life experiences, he will not be able to recognize (to feel in the
moment) the ways in which the patient is unconsciously attempting
to, and to some degree succeeding in, taking on the depression of the
analyst-as-transference-mother.
The aspects of the analyst’s depression that arise from sources inde-
pendent of his unconscious identification with the patient’s depressed
internal object mother are far less available to the patient’s minister-
ings because the patient cannot find in the analyst the depression of
his (the patient’s) mother which for nearly the whole of his life he has
intimately known and attended to. The patient is single-mindedly
concerned with the depression that is unique to his internal object
mother. (Each person’s depression is his or her own unique creation
rooted in the particular circumstances of his or her own life experi-
ence and personality organization.) Winnicott is suggesting that the
analyst must cope with his own depression in order that he might
experience the patient’s (internal object) mother’s depression (that is
being projected into him). Only if he is able to contain/live with the
experience of the (internal object) mother’s depression (as distinct
from his own depression) will he be able to experience the patient’s
pathological effort to relieve the mother’s psychological pain (now
felt to be located in the analyst) by introjecting it into himself (the
patient) as a noxious foreign body.
1 The term “depression,” as it is used in this sentence, seems to refer to a wide spectrum of
psychological states ranging from clinical depression to the universal depression associated
with the achievement of the depressive position (Klein, 1952). The latter is a normative
stage of development and “mode of generating experience” (Ogden, 1989, p. 9) involving
whole object relatedness, ambivalence and a deep sense of loss in recognizing one’s sepa-
rateness from one’s mother.
80
The second clause of the sentence being discussed, while intro-

duced by Winnicott as if it were simply another way of saying what
he has already said in the first clause (“or shall I say”), is in fact some-
thing altogether new: the analyst of a depressed patient must cope
with his own “guilt and grief resultant from the destructive elements
in his own (the analyst’s) love” (p. 146). Thus, the analyst of the
depressed patient must also be able to live with the inevitable destruc-
tiveness of love in the sense that love involves a demand on the loved
object which may (in fantasy, and, at times, in reality) be too much
of a strain for the person one loves. In other words, the analyst, in the
course of his personal analysis and by means of his ongoing self-
analysis, must come to terms with his own fears of the draining effects
of his love sufficiently to be able to love his patient without fear that
such feelings will harm the patient and thereby cause himself (the
analyst) “guilt and grief.” I am aware of the awkwardness of my own
language in discussing this passage. These ideas are difficult to convey
in part because of the extreme compactness of Winnicott’s language
and, in part, because Winnicott has not yet fully worked out the
ideas he is presenting. Moreover, the ideas he is developing here
involve irresolvable emotional contradictions and paradoxes: the
analyst must be sufficiently free of depression to experience the
depression which the depressed patient projects into him. The analyst
must also be able to love without fear of the toll that his love takes
– for if the analyst is frightened of the destructive effects of his own
love, there is little chance of his analyzing the patient’s fears of the
taxing/destructive effects of his love on the analyst.
Winnicott does not stop here. In the sentence that follows, he revo-
lutionizes (and I use the word advisedly) the psychoanalytic concep-
tion of “the analytic frame” by viewing it as a medium for the
expression of the analyst’s hatred of the patient: “the end of the hour,
the end of the analysis, the rules and regulations, these all come in as
expressions of [the analyst’s] hate” (p. 147). These words derive a good
deal of their power from the fact that the truth of the idea
that the analyst expresses his hate in these actions (which are so ordi-
nary as to go frequently unnoticed) is immediately recognizable by the
analytic reader as part of his experience with virtually every patient.
Winnicott is recognizing/interpreting the unspoken expressions of
hate that the analyst/reader unconsciously and preconsciously experi-
ences (often accompanied by feelings of relief) in “throwing the patient
out” (by punctually ending each meeting) and by establishing the limits
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of what he will provide the patient (by maintaining the other aspects
of the analytic frame). Implicit here is the notion that the analyst’s
fear of the destructiveness of his hatred of the patient may lead to
treatment-destructive breaches of the analytic frame: for example,
extending the session for more than a few minutes in order “not to cut
the patient off,” or setting the fee at a level below what the patient is
able to afford “because the patient has been consistently exploited by
his parents in childhood,” or reflexively telephoning the patient when
the patient has missed a session “to be sure he is all right,” and so on.
Only by looking closely at these sentences can one discern and
appreciate what is going on in the very living relationship between
the writing and the reader that constitutes so much of the life of the
ideas being developed. As we have seen, the writing demands that
the reader become an active partner in the creation of meaning. The
writing (like the communications of an analysand) suggests, and only
suggests, possibilities of meaning. The reader/analyst must be willing
and able not to know in order to make room in himself for a number
of possible meanings to be experienced/created, and to allow one
meaning or another or several meanings concurrently to achieve
ascendance (for a time).
Moreover, it is important to note that the writing “works” (to
borrow a word from Winnicott’s statement of his “method”) in large
measure by means of its power to understand (to correctly interpret
the unconscious of) the reader. Perhaps all good writing (whether it
be in poems, plays, novels or essays) to a significant degree “works”
in this way.
Winnicott’s writing in the paper under discussion (and in almost
all of the papers included in his three major volumes of collected
papers [1958, 1965, 1971d]) is surprisingly short on clinical material.
This, I believe, is a consequence of the fact that the “clinical experi-
ence” is to such a large degree located in the reader’s experience of
“being read” (that is, of being interpreted, understood) by the writing.
When Winnicott does offer clinical material, he often refers not to a
specific intervention with a particular patient, but to a “very common
experience” (1945, p. 150) in analysis. In this way, he implicitly asks
the reader to draw on his own lived experience with patients: not for
the purpose of “taking in” Winnicott’s ideas, but to invite from the
reader an “original response” (Frost, 1942a, p. 307).
Still other forms of generative interplay of style and content, of
writing and reader, take on central importance in a passage a bit later
82
in the paper which addresses experiences of unintegration and inte-

gration in early development:
An example of unintegration phenomena is provided by the very

common experience of the patient who proceeds to give every
detail of the week-end and feels contented at the end if everything
has been said, though the analyst feels that no analytic work has
been done. Sometimes we must interpret this as the patient’s need
to be known in all his bits and pieces by one person, the analyst. To
be known means to feel integrated at least in the person of the
analyst. This is the ordinary stuff of infant life, and an infant who
has had no one person to gather his bits together starts with a hand-
icap in his own self-integrating task, and perhaps he cannot succeed,
or at any rate cannot maintain integration with confidence . . .
There are long stretches of time in a normal infant’s life in
which a baby does not mind whether he is in many bits or one
whole being, or whether he lives in his mother’s face or in his own
body, provided that from time to time he comes together and feels
something.
(p. 150)
Implicit in this passage is the recognition of the analyst’s anger at

patients who “give every detail of the week-end,” leaving the analyst
with the feeling “that no analytic work has been done.” Winnicott
leaves it entirely to the reader to imagine the analyst’s impulse to
dump his anger and feelings of failure back into the patient in the
form of a resistance interpretation (“You seem to be filling the hour
with details that serve to defeat any possibility of analytic work getting
done” [my example]).
Winnicott then provides the reader with a major revision of analytic
technique. He accomplishes this so subtly that the reader is apt not to
notice it if he is not attending carefully to what is going on in the
writing. Nothing short of a new way of being with and talking to
patients is being offered, without preaching or fanfare: “Sometimes we
must interpret2 this [the patient’s giving every detail of his week-end]
2 It seems to me that Winnicott is referring here to silent interpretations that the analyst
formulates in words for himself in the moment and may at a later time present to the
patient.
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as the patient’s need to be known in all his bits and pieces by one
person, the analyst.” The phrase “Sometimes we must” addresses the
reader as a colleague who is familiar with the clinical situation being
described, and who very likely has felt it necessary to intervene in the
way Winnicott is describing. Perhaps the reader/analyst has not fully
named for himself what he has been experiencing and doing with his
patient. The language does not debunk the angry resistance interpreta-
tion that the reader/analyst has either made or has been inclined to
make in response to his feelings of frustration and failure. Winnicott,
by means of the language he uses to address the reader, provides an
experience in reading that helps the reader undefensively to gather
together his own unarticulated experiences from his own analysis and
from his analytic work with his patients.
Moreover, the simple phrase “very common experience” conveys
an important theoretical concept (again without calling attention to
itself): primitive states of unintegration are not restricted to the anal-
ysis of severely disturbed patients; such states regularly occur in the
analysis of all of our patients, including the healthiest ones. This
writing “technique” does not have the feel of a manipulation of the
reader; rather, it feels like a good interpretation – a statement that
puts into words what the reader/analyst has known from his experi-
ence all along, but has not known that he has known it, and has not
known it in the verbally symbolized, integrated way that he is
currently coming to know it.
The second paragraph of the passage being discussed is remarkable:
There are long stretches of time in a normal infant’s life in which a

baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or
whether he lives in his mother’s face or in his own body, provided
that from time to time he comes together and feels something.
(p. 150)
This sentence is distinctive, not only for the originality of the ideas it
develops, but also for the way in which its syntax participates in a
sensory way in the creation of those ideas. The sentence is constructed
of many (I count ten) groups of words that are read with a very brief
pause between them (for instance, a pause after the words “time,”
“life,” “mind,” and so on). The sentence not only states, but brings
to life in its own audible structure, the experience of living in bits
(“for a long time”) in a meandering sort of way before coming
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together (for a moment) in its final two bits: “he comes together”
and “feels something.” The voice, syntax, rhythm, and carefully
chosen words and expressions which constitute this sentence –
working together as they do with the ideas being developed – create
an experience in reading that is as distinctively Winnicott as the
opening paragraph of the The Sound and the Fury is distinctively
Faulkner, or as the opening sentence of The Portrait of a Lady is
uniquely Henry James.
The reader of the sentence being discussed is not moved to ques-
tion how Winnicott can possibly know what an infant feels or to
point out that regressions in the analyses of children and adults
(whether psychotic, depressed or quite healthy) bear a very uncertain
correlation with infantile experience. Rather, the reader is inclined
to suspend disbelief for a time and to enter into the experience of
reading (with Winnicott) and to allow himself to be carried by the
music of the language and ideas. The reader lives an experience (in
the act of reading) that is something like that of the imagined infant
who does not mind whether he is in many bits (experiencing a
floating feeling that accompanies non-linear thinking) or one whole
being (experiencing a “momentary stay against confusion” [Frost,
1939, p. 777]). Winnicott’s writing, like a guide “who only has at
heart your getting lost” (Frost, 1947, p. 341), ensures that we will
never get it right in any final way, and we do not mind.
Subliminally, the pun on “mind” allows the clause “a baby does
not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being” to concen-
trate into itself different overlapping meanings. The baby “does not
mind” because the mother is there “minding” him (taking care of
him). And he “does not mind” in that he feels no pressure to be
“minded,” that is, to create premature, defensive mindedness which
is disconnected from bodily experience. The writing itself, in
punning, deftly and unselfconsciously creates just such an experience
of the pleasure of not minding, of not having to know, of not having
to pin down meaning, instead, simply enjoying the liveliness of a fine
experience in the medium of language and ideas.
The language that Winnicott uses in describing the infant’s coming
together in one place is surprising in that the “place” where coming
together occurs is not a place at all, but an action (the act of feeling
something). Moreover, the infant, in “coming together,” does not
simply feel, he “feels something” (p. 150). The word “something”
has a delightful ambiguity to it: “something” is a concrete thing, the
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object that is felt; and, at the same time, “something” is the most
indefinite of words suggesting only that some feeling is experienced.
This delicate ambiguity creates in the experience of reading the flick-
ering of the feeling-world of the infant, a world loosely bound to
objects, loosely localized, experienced now in the body as objectless
sensation, now in the more defined and localized sensation of feeling
an object, now in the mother’s face.3
The unexpected turns, the quiet revolutions occurring in this early
Winnicott paper are too numerous to address. I cannot resist,
however, taking a moment simply to marvel at the way in which
Winnicott, the pediatrician, the child-analyst, nonchalantly jettisons
the accrued technical language of 50 years of psychoanalytic writing
in favor of language that is alive with the experiences he is describing:
there are the quiet and the excited states. I think an infant cannot
be said to be aware at the start that while feeling this and that in his
cot or enjoying the skin stimulations of bathing, he is the same as
himself screaming for immediate satisfaction, possessed by an urge
to get at and destroy something unless satisfied by milk. This means
that he does not know at first that the mother he is building up
through his quiet experiences is the same as the power behind the
breasts that he has in his mind to destroy.
(p. 151)
The infant has his quiet and his excited states – everyone who has
spent time with a baby knows this, but why had no one thought to
put it this way? The baby feels “this and that” (there is ease in the
language as there is ease in the baby’s state of mind-body) and enjoys
the “skin stimulations of bathing” and “cannot be said to be aware
[in the quiet states] . . . that . . . he is the same as himself screaming
for immediate satisfaction.” (And how better to capture at the same
time the underlying continuity of identity across discontinuous
feeling/meaning states than with unobtrusive alliteration of “s”
3 The role played by the word “something” in this sentence is reminiscent of Frost’s use of
nouns to simultaneously invoke the mysterious and the utterly concrete and mundane,
for example, in lines such as “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (1914, p. 39)
or “One had to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept” (1923a, p.
223) or “What was that whiteness?/ Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, some-
thing” (1923b, p. 208).
86
sounds – 16 times in one sentence – in words carrying a very wide

range of meaning: “states,” “start,” “skin,” “stimulation,” “same,”
“screaming,” “satisfaction,” “something,” and “satisfied?”)4
Winnicott continues:
Also I think there is not necessarily an integration between a child

asleep and a child awake . . . Once dreams are remembered and
even conveyed somehow to a third person, the dissociation is
broken down a little; but some people never clearly remember
their dreams, and children depend very much on adults for getting
to know their dreams. It is normal for small children to have
anxiety dreams and terrors. At these times, children need someone
to help them to remember what they dreamed. It is a valuable
experience whenever a dream is both dreamed and remembered,
precisely because of the breakdown of dissociation that this
represents.
(p. 151).
In this part of the paper, Winnicott speaks of how important it is

for a child to have the experience of conveying his dream “somehow
to a third person.” Every time I read this sentence, I find it jarring
and confusing. I attempt to account for a third person in the appar-
ently two-person experience of a dream (not yet the child’s creation
or possession) being “conveyed somehow” to a third person. Is the
third person the experience of the father’s symbolic presence even in
his absence? Perhaps, but such an idea seems too much an experience
of the mind disconnected from the bodily feel, the sense of aliveness
that one experiences when engaging with a child in spoken or
unspoken conversation. A dream unobtrusively can be entered into
a conversation or into playing, sometimes wordlessly, because the
child is the dream before the dream is his. Thus, the three people are,
4 Of course, I am not suggesting that Winnicott planned, or even was aware of, the way he
was using alliteration, syntax, rhythm, punning and so on to create specific effects in his
use of language any more than a talented poet plans ahead of time which metaphors,
images, rhymes, rhythms, meters, syntactical structures, diction, allusions, line lengths and
so on that he will use. The act of writing seems to have a life of its own. It is one of the
“rights and privileges,” as well as one of the pleasures, of critical reading to attempt to
discern what is going on in a piece of writing – regardless of whether the writer intended
it or was even cognizant of it.
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from this perspective, the dreaming child, the waking child and the
adult. This interpretation is suggested by the language, but the reader,
once again, must do the work of imaginatively entering into the
experience of reading. The language quietly creates (as opposed to
discusses) the confusion that the reader/child experiences about how
many people are present in the act of conveying a dream to an adult.
The reader experiences what it feels like for a child to be two people
and not to notice that experience until an adult gives him help in
“getting to know [what are becoming his] dreams” (p. 151). “Getting
to know” his dreams – the expression is uniquely Winnicott; no one
else could have written these words. The phrase is implicitly a meta-
phor in which an adult “makes the introductions” in the first meeting
of a waking child and his dreams. In this imaginary social event, not
only is the child learning that he has a dream-life, his unconscious is
learning that “it” (which in health is forever in the process of
becoming “I”) has a “waking-life.”
The metaphorical language of this passage is carrying a heavy
theoretical load without the slightest evidence of strain. First of all,
there is the matter that, as Freud put it, the unconscious “is alive”
(1915c, p. 190), and consequently “getting to know” one’s dreams is
no less than the beginnings of healthy communication at the “fron-
tier” (Freud, 1915c, p. 193) of the unconscious and preconscious
mind. As the waking child and the dreaming child become acquainted
with one another (i.e. as the child comes to experience himself as the
same person who has both a waking-life and a dream-life), the expe-
rience of dreaming feels less strange (other to oneself) and hence less
frightening.5
It might be said that when a dream is both dreamed and remem-
bered, the conversation between the conscious-preconscious and the
unconscious aspects of mind “across the repression barrier” is
enhanced. But once it is put in these terms, the reasons for enjoying
Winnicott’s writing become all the more apparent. In contrast to the
noun-laden language of preconscious, conscious, unconscious, repression
and so on, Winnicott’s language seems to be all verb: “feeling some-
thing,” “getting to know their dreams,” “screaming,” “possessed.”
5 Even as adults, we never completely experience dream-life and waking-life as two different
forms of the experience of ourselves as one person. This is reflected in the language we use
in talking about dreams. For example, we say “I had a dream last night” [it happened to
me] and not “I made a dream last night.”
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Having discussed the infant’s early experience of coming together

(in health) from his experience of living in bits and pieces (unintegra-
tion) and from a variety of forms of dissociation (e.g. the dissociation
of dreaming and waking states), Winnicott turns to the infant’s expe-
rience of his earliest relations with external reality:
In terms of baby and mother’s breast (I am not claiming that the

breast is essential as a vehicle of mother-love) the baby has instinc-
tual urges and predatory ideas. The mother has a breast and the
power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be
attacked by a hungry baby. These two phenomena do not come
into relation with each other till the mother and child live an expe-
rience together. The mother being mature and physically able has to
be the one with tolerance and understanding, so that it is she who
produces a situation that may with luck result in the first tie the
infant makes with an external object, an object that is external to
the self from the infant’s point of view.
(p. 152)
In this passage the language is doing far more than is apparent.

“The baby [at this juncture] has instinctual urges and predatory ideas.
The mother [with an internal life quite separate from that of the
infant] has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that
she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby.” The deadly serious-
ness (and violence) of these words – instinctual urges, predatory,
power, attack – plays off against the whimsy and humor of the inten-
tionally over-drawn images. The notion of a baby with “predatory
ideas” conjures up images of a scheming mastermind criminal in
diapers. And, in a similar way, the notion of a mother who would
like to be “attacked by a hungry baby” stirs up images of a mother
(her large breasts engorged with milk) walking through dimly-lit
alleys at night hoping to be violently assaulted by a hoodlum
baby with a terrible craving for milk. The language, at once serious
and playful (at times even ridiculous), creates a sense of the comple-
mentarity of the internal states of mother and infant: a complemen-
tarity that is going on only in parallel, and not yet in relation to one
another.
In the sentence that immediately follows, we find one of
Winnicott’s most important theoretical contributions to psychoanal-
ysis, an idea that has significantly shaped the subsequent 65 years of
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the history of analytic thought. As the idea is rendered here, it is, to

my mind, even more richly suggestive than it is in its later, more
familiar forms: “These two phenomena [the infant with his predatory
urges and ideas and the mother with her instinctual urges and
her wish to be attacked by a hungry baby] do not come into
relation with each other till the mother and child live an experience
together” (p. 152).
“Live an experience together” – what makes the phrase remarkable is
the unexpected word “live.” The mother and child do not “take part
in,” “share,” “participate in” or “enter into” an experience together:
they live an experience together. In this single phrase, Winnicott is
suggesting (though I think he is not fully aware of this as he writes
this paper) that he is in the process of transforming psychoanalysis,
both as a theory and as a therapeutic relationship, in a way that
involves altering the notion of what is most fundamental to human
psychology. No longer will it be desiring and regulating desire
[Freud], loving, hating, and making reparations [Klein], or object-
seeking and object-relating [Fairbairn] that are of greatest importance
in the development of the psyche-soma from its beginnings and
continuing throughout life. Instead, what Winnicott is beginning to
lay out here for the first time is the idea that the central organizing
thread of psychological development from its inception is the experi-
ence of being alive and the consequences of disruptions to that conti-
nuity of being.
The specific way in which Winnicott uses language in this passage
is critical to the nature of the meanings being generated. In the phrase
“live an experience together,” “live” is a transitive verb, which
takes “experience” as its object. Living an experience is an act of
doing something to someone or something (as much as the act
of hitting a ball is an act of doing something to the ball); it is an act
of infusing experience with life. Human experience does not have
life until we live it (as opposed to simply having it in an operational
way). Mother and child do not come into relation to one another
until they each do something to experience, that is, they live it
together (not simply at the same time, but while experiencing and
responding to one another’s separate act of being alive in living the
experience).
The paragraph concludes: “The mother being mature and physi-
cally able has to be the one with tolerance and understanding, so that
it is she who produces a situation that may with luck result in the first
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tie the infant makes with an external object, an object that is

external to the self from the infant’s point of view” (p. 152). The
unstated paradox that emerges here involves the idea that living an
experience together serves to separate the mother and infant (to bring
them, from the infant’s perspective, “into relation with each other”
as separate entities). This paradox lies at the heart of the experience
of illusion: “I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite
directions, liable to come near each other. If they overlap, there is a
moment of illusion – a bit of experience which the infant can take
as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality”
(p. 152).
Of course, what is being introduced is the concept that Winnicott
(1951) later termed “transitional phenomena.” The “moment of illu-
sion” is a moment of psychological “overlap” of the mother and
infant – a moment in which the mother lives an experience with the
infant in which she actively/unconsciously/naturally provides herself
as an object that can be experienced by the infant at once as his crea-
tion (an unnoticed experience because there is nothing that is not
what is expected) and as his discovery (an event with a quality of
otherness in a world external to his sense of self).
In other language, the infant comes to the breast when excited,

and ready to hallucinate something fit to be attacked. At that
moment, the actual nipple appears and he is able to feel it was that
nipple that he hallucinated. So his ideas are enriched by actual
details of sight, feel, smell, and next time this material is used in the
hallucination. In this way he starts to build a capacity to conjure
up what is actually available. The mother has to go on giving the
infant this type of experience.
(pp. 152–153)
What Winnicott is attempting to describe (and succeeds in

capturing in his use of language) is not simply an experience, but a
way of experiencing that is lighter, more full of darting energy, than
other ways of experiencing. The initial metaphor that Winnicott uses
to introduce this way of experiencing involves the image of mother
and infant as two lines (or is it lives?) coming from opposite direc-
tions (from the world of magic and from the world of grounded
consensual reality) which are “liable to come near each other”
(p. 152). The word “liable” is unexpected with its connotations of
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chance events (perhaps of an unwelcome nature?). Is there a hint of

irony about accidents being a port of entry into the “real world”?
For Winnicott, the maternal provision is even more complex than
that of creating a psychological-interpersonal field in which the infant
gains entry at the same moment into external reality, internal reality
and the experience of illusion. The mother’s task at this stage of
things also involves protecting “her infant from complications that
cannot yet be understood by the infant” (p. 153). “Complications” is
a word newly made in this sentence. In Winnicott’s hands, the
word “complications” takes on a rather specific set of meanings
having to do with a convergence of internal and external stimuli
that are related to each other in ways that are beyond the capacity
of the infant to understand. A few years later, speaking of the
mother’s efforts “not to introduce complications beyond what the
infant can understand and allow for,” Winnicott adds: “in particular
she tries to insulate her baby from coincidences” (1949, p. 245).
“Coincidences” is a word even more richly enigmatic than “compli-
cations.” It is a word with a long and troubling history in Western
myth and literature. (Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus myth repre-
sents only one instance of the ruin that “coincidence” can leave in its
wake.)
Winnicott does not explain what he means by “coincidences” or
“complications,” much less how one goes about insulating babies
from them. His indefinite, enigmatic language does not fill a space
with knowledge, it opens up a space for thinking, imagining and
freshly experiencing. One possible reading of the words “complica-
tions” and “coincidences” (as Winnicott is using/creating them) that
I sometimes find useful goes as follows: The coincidences or compli-
cations from which a baby needs to be insulated involve chance
simultaneities of events taking place in the infant’s internal and
external realities at a time when the two are only beginning to be
differentiated from one another. For instance, a hungry infant may
become both fearful and rageful as he waits for his mother longer
than he can tolerate. The mother may be feeling preoccupied and
distraught for reasons that have nothing to do with the infant –
perhaps as a consequence of a recent argument with her husband, or
physical pain that she fears is a symptom of a serious illness. The
simultaneity of the internal event (the infant’s hunger, fear, rage) and
the external event (the mother’s emotional absence) is a coincidence
that the infant cannot understand. He makes sense of it by imagining
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that it is his own anger and predatory urges that have killed the
mother. The mother who had earlier wished to be attacked by a
hungry baby is gone and in her place is a lifeless mother passively
allowing herself to be attacked by the hungry baby as carrion is avail-
able for consumption by vultures.
“Coincidence” leads the infant defensively to bring a degree of
order and control to his experience by drawing what was becoming
the external world back into his internal world by means of omnipo-
tent fantasy: “I killed her.” In contrast, when a mother and child are
able to “live an experience together,” the vitality of the child’s
internal world is recognized and met by the external world (the
mother’s act of living the experience together with him). Winnicott
does not state these ideas as such, but they are there to be found/
created by the reader.
A note of caution is needed here with regard to the license a
reader may take in creating a text and that caveat is provided by
Winnicott. It is implicit in all of Winnicott’s writing that creativity
must not be valorized above all else. Creativity is not only worthless,
it is lethal (literally so in the case of an infant) when disconnected
from objectivity – that is, from “acceptance of external reality”
(p. 53). An infant forever hallucinating what he needs will starve to
death; a reader who loses touch with the writing will not be able to
learn from it.
Winnicott’s conception of the infant’s earliest experience of
accepting external reality is as beautifully rendered as it is subtle in
content:
One thing that follows the acceptance of external reality is the

advantage to be gained from it. We often hear of the very real
frustrations imposed by external reality, but less often hear of the
relief and satisfaction it affords. Real milk is satisfying as compared
with imaginary milk, but this is not the point. The point is that
in fantasy things work by magic: there are no brakes on fantasy,
and love and hate cause alarming effects. External reality has
brakes on it, and can be studied and known, and, in fact, fantasy is
only tolerable at full blast when objective reality is appreciated
well. The subjective has tremendous value but is so alarming
and magical that it cannot be enjoyed except as a parallel to the
objective.
(p. 153)
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This is a muscular passage. After acknowledging what is already

self-evident (“Real milk is satisfying as compared to imaginary
milk”), the passage seems to break open mid-sentence: “but this is
not the point. The point is that in fantasy things work by magic:
there are no brakes on fantasy, and love and hate cause alarming
effects.” External reality is not simply an abstraction in these sentences;
it is alive in the language. It is a felt presence in the sound of the
words – for instance, in the dense, cold metallic sound of the word
“brakes” (which evokes in me the image of a locomotive with wheels
locked screeching to a halt over smooth iron tracks). The metaphor
of a vehicle without the means to be stopped (a metaphor implicit in
the words “without brakes”) is elaborated as the sentence proceeds:
“love and hate cause alarming effects.” Love and hate are without a
subject, thus making the metaphorical vehicle not only without
brakes but also without a driver (or engineer).
The modulating effects of external reality can be felt in the restraint
and frequent pauses in the first half of the sentence that immediately
follows: “External reality has brakes on it, [–] and can be studied and
known [–], and [–], in fact [–] . . .” (p. 153). Having been slowed,
the sentence (and the experience of internal and external reality)
unfolds in a more flowing (which is not to say bland or lifeless) way:
“fantasy is only tolerable at full blast when objective reality is appre-
ciated well.”
Winnicott returns to the subject of illusion again and again in
“Primitive emotional development,” each time viewing it from a
somewhat different perspective. He is without peer in his ability to
capture in words what illusion might feel like to a baby. For instance,
on returning to the subject late in the paper, he says that for illusion
to be generated, “a simple contact with external or shared reality has
to be made by the infant’s hallucinating and the world’s presenting,
with moments of illusion for the infant in which the two are taken
by him to be identical, which they never in fact are” (p. 154). For
this to happen, someone “has to be taking the trouble [a wonderfully
simple way to acknowledge the fact that being mother to an infant is
a lot of work and a lot of trouble] all the time [even when she longs
for even an hour of sleep] to bring the world to the baby in under-
standable form [without too many complications and coincidences],
and in a limited way, suitable to the baby’s needs” (p. 154). The
rhythm of the series of clauses making up this sentence heaps require-
ment upon requirement that the mother must meet in creating
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illusion for the baby. These efforts of the mother constitute the
intense backstage labor necessary if the infant is to enjoy his orchestra
seat in the performance of illusion. The performance reveals not a
hint of the dirty grunt work that creates and safeguards the life of the
illusion.
The humor of the contrast between illusion as seen from backstage
and from an orchestra seat is I think not at all lost upon Winnicott.
The juxtaposition of the passage just quoted (something of a job
description for the mother of a baby) and the paragraph that follows
(which captures all of the sense of wonder and amazement a child
feels on seeing a magic show) can hardly be a coincidence: “The
subject of illusion . . . will be found to provide the clue to a child’s
interest in bubbles and clouds and rainbows and all mysterious
phenomena, and also to his interest in fluff . . . Somewhere here, too,
is the interest in breath, which never decides whether it comes
primarily from within or without” (p. 154). I am not aware of a
comparable expression in all of the analytic literature of the almost
translucent, mystifying quality of imaginative experience which
becomes possible when the full blast to fantasy is made safe by a
child’s sturdy grasp on external reality.
Concluding comments
In this, the first of his major papers, Winnicott quietly, unassumingly

defies the conventional wisdom which holds writing to be primarily
a means to an end: a means by which analytic data and ideas are
conveyed to readers as telephones and telephone lines transport the
voice in the form of electrical impulses and sound waves. The notion
that our experiences as analysts and the ideas with which we make
sense of them are inseparable from the language we use to create/
convey them is an idea that some analysts strenuously resist. For
them, it is disappointing to acknowledge that discourse among
analysts, whether written or spoken, will forever remain limited by
our imprecise, impressionistic (and consequently confusing and
misleading) accounts of what we observe and how we think about
what we do as psychoanalysts. For others, the inseparability of our
observations and ideas, on the one hand, and the language we use to
express them, on the other, is an exciting idea – it embraces the
indissoluble interpenetration of life and art, neither preceding the
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other, neither holding dominion over the other. To be alive (in more
than an operational sense) is to be forever in the process of making
things of one’s own, whether they be thoughts, feelings, bodily
movements, perceptions, conversations, poems or analytic papers.
No psychoanalyst’s writing bears witness better than Winnicott’s
to the mutually dependent, mutually enlivening relationship of life
and art.
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6
Reading Bion
Bion’s writing is difficult: often turgid, frequently confounding

(maddeningly so), and regularly mystifying. And yet, I find that my
attempts to paraphrase his writing almost always leave me feeling that
I have lost what is most important to Bion’s thinking. I offer here
some thoughts on how, over the years, I have come to read Bion,
which I hope will be of help to others in their efforts at finding their
own ways to read his work. Perhaps most important to the way I
read his work is the state of mind I try to bring to it – a state of mind
in which I fully accept what I believe to be Bion’s view of his own
writing: he strives not to be understood, but to serve as a catalyst for
the reader’s own thinking.
A second orienting idea that I bring to my reading of Bion is a
conception of Bion’s opus as being comprised of two periods that I
think of as “early” and “late” Bion. I view the writing in the two
periods as based on overlapping, yet distinctly different sets of assump-
tions regarding psychoanalysis. The writing from the two periods
requires different ways of reading, which generate different experi-
ences in reading. I believe that much confusion is generated if the
reader treats Bion’s early and late work as constituting a gradual
unfolding of ideas that are continuous in their view of psychological
development. To my mind, the late work, while incorporating and
assuming a thorough familiarity with the early work, represents a
radical departure from it. “Early Bion,” as I conceive of this body
of work, consists of all of his writing up to and including Learning
from Experience (1962a); “late Bion” begins with Elements of Psycho-
Analysis (1963) and continues through the remainder of his work
(in which Attention and Interpretation [1970] stands as the major
contribution).
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Creative Readings
In this essay on reading Bion, I take as starting points the experi-

ence of reading two passages, one from Learning from Experience
(1962a) and the other from Attention and Interpretation (1970). In these
passages, Bion suggests to the reader the way he would like his “early”
and “late” writing to be read. In this endeavor, I am not attempting
to arrive at what Bion “really meant”; rather, I am interested in
seeing what use – clinically and theoretically – I am able to make of
my own experiences of reading early and late Bion. On the basis of
many comments made by Bion in the last decade of his life, there can
be little doubt that this is the way Bion would hope to have all of his
work read: “The way that I do analysis is of no importance to anybody
excepting myself, but it may give you some idea of how you do
analysis, and that is important” (1978, p. 206).
In the final section of this chapter, I present a detailed account of an
analytic session and then discuss the analytic experience from a point
of view that is informed by Bion’s work, particularly his late work.
Bion on reading early Bion
In the introduction to Learning from Experience, Bion carefully and

patiently explains to the reader how he would like this book to be
read:
The book is designed to be read straight through once without

checking at parts that might be obscure at first. Some obscurities
are due to the impossibility of writing without pre-supposing
familiarity with some aspect of a problem that is only worked on
later. If the reader will read straight through, those points will
become clearer as he proceeds. Unfortunately obscurities also exist
because of my inability to make them clearer. The reader may find
the effort to clarify these for himself is rewarding and not simply
work that has been forced on him because I have not done it
myself.
(1962a, p. ii)
In this passage, Bion, in a highly compact way, provides several

thoughts on reading his text. First, the reader must be able to tolerate
not knowing, getting lost, being confused and pressing ahead anyway.
The words “obscure,” “obscurities” (mentioned twice), “clearer”
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Reading Bion
and “clarify” (each also used twice) pile up in these five sentences.
What it is to learn from experience (or the inability to do so) will be
something for the reader to experience first-hand in the act of reading
this book – an experience in reading that does not simply “progress”
from obscurity to clarification, but resides in a continuous process of
clarification negating obscurity and obscurity negating clarification.
Bion, not without an edge of irony and wit, suggests that the reader
“may find [it] . . . rewarding” to attempt to “clarify [obscurities]” for
himself “not simply because I have not done it myself.” In other
words, if the reader is to engage in something more than “merely
reading” (1962a, p. ii) this book, he must become the author of his
own book (his own set of thoughts) more or less based on Bion’s.
Only then will the reader have generated the possibility of learning
from his experience of reading.
Bion (1992), in a note to himself, a “cogitation” which in all prob-
ability was written during the period in which he was writing Learning
from Experience, elaborates on the idea that the act of reading is an
experience in its own right to be lived and learned from: “A book
would have failed for the reader if it does not become an object of
study, and the reading of it an emotional experience in itself” (1992,
p. 261). In another “cogitation,” Bion presents his “early” concep-
tion of how analytic writing works, and by implication, how he
would like to be read. (The passage I will cite immediately follows a
brief page-and-a-half account of an analytic session that includes
detailed observations of both Bion’s emotional experience and that
of his psychotic patient.)
I do not feel able to communicate to the reader an account that

would be likely to satisfy me as correct. I am more confident that
I could make the reader understand what I had to put up with if I
could extract from him a promise that he would faithfully read
every word I wrote; I would then set about writing several hundred
thousand words virtually indistinguishable from what I have
already written in my account of the two sessions. In short, I
cannot have as much confidence in my ability to tell the reader
what happened as I have in my ability to do something to the
reader that I have had done to me. I have had an emotional expe-
rience; I feel confident in my ability to recreate that emotional
experience, but not to represent it.
(1992, p. 219)
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In this elegant prose – Bion is a difficult writer, not a bad writer

– Bion envisions psychoanalytic writing as an effort not to report, but
to create an emotional experience that is very close to the emotional
experience that the analyst has had in the analysis. In this passage, and
the clinical account that precedes it, Bion is doing what he is saying;
he is demonstrating as opposed to describing. In the clinical work
presented, the psychotic patient, “who [in reality] may commit a
murder” (p. 218), whispers at the end of the session, “I will not stand
it” (p. 219). Bion comments that “there seems to be no reason such
sessions should ever come to an end” (p. 219). (In this last sentence,
Bion is speaking from the patient’s point of view and in so doing
communicates what is unstated in the sentence and in the session,
and yet is ominously present in both: in a psychotic field, time is
obliterated and endings are arbitrary and unexpected – and conse-
quently may incite actual murder.)
In his comments following the clinical account, Bion succeeds at
getting into the language itself something of his experience of being
with the patient. He imagines writing several hundred thousand
words about “what I had to put up with” and “extract[ing]” – a
word that is alive with the sound of violent coercion – “a promise”
from the reader. The promise “that [the reader] would faithfully read
every word I wrote” is “extract[ed]” before the reader knows of the
forthcoming onslaught of words – words that add nothing to what
Bion has already said. The experience in reading that Bion is
imagining is a tortured one – one that would never come to an end
and may incite murderous feelings in the reader. In this way, Bion
creates something like the emotional experience he lived with his
patient, as opposed to “represent[ing]” it (i.e. describing it). To
describe the analytic experience would be to mispresent it because
the emotional vantage point of the writing would be from a place
outside of the experience, when, in fact, Bion’s experience was
simultaneously generated from within and outside of the analytic
event: “We [analysts] must be able to have these strong feelings and
be able to go on thinking clearly even when we have them” (Bion,
1978, p. 187).
To summarize, in offering his thoughts on how he would like
Learning from Experience to be read, Bion portrays a state of mind
(generated in the act of reading) that is at once open to living an
emotional experience and at the same time actively engaged in clari-
fying obscurities and obscuring (i.e. releasing itself from the closures
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Reading Bion
of) clarifications. These mental activities in concert constitute a

substantial part of what it means to learn from experience, both in
reading and in the analytic situation. This is at core a hermeneutic
approach in which there is a progressive dialectical movement
between obscurity and clarification which moves toward, though
never achieves, closure.
A mixing of tongues
In examining the emotional experience of reading Learning from

Experience, it is impossible to ignore the strangeness of the language
and terminology that Bion employs. In part, he is attempting to
cleanse analytic terminology of the ossified and ossifying “penumbra
of associations” (1962a, p. 2) that have accrued over time, and instead,
to use “meaningless term[s]” (p. 3) (such as alpha- and beta-elements)
unsaturated by previous usage. However, not all of the strangeness of
Bion’s language is attributable to that effort to generate analytic
language disencumbered by accretions of meaning. A large part of
the opacity of Bion’s writing derives from his mixing the language,
notational systems and conceptions belonging to the fields of math-
ematics and symbolic logic (for example, the concepts of functions
and factors) with the language of psychoanalysis.
Bion refers again and again to the set of ideas that he is developing
in Learning from Experience as “a theory of functions” (p. 2) and devotes
much of the first two chapters of the book to explaining what he
means by a function. Bion uses the term “function” to refer to a form
of mental operation that determines the outcome of every psychic
event governed by that mental operation. In mathematics, addition,
subtraction, multiplication and division (along with differential and
integral calculus) are functions. So when we say a + b = c, we are
saying that when the function of addition (represented by the + sign)
is in operation, we know the relationship among a, b and c. In
Learning from Experience, Bion is attempting to release psychoanalytic
thinking from the confines of the specifics of a given analytic event,
thus facilitating the delineation of a small number of essential
psychological functions which are very roughly analogous to math-
ematical functions. This conception of the task of analytic theory
accounts for the highly abstract nature of Bion’s writing and the
paucity of clinical material presented in his work. (Mathematics,
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according to Bion, could not have developed as a system of logical

thought if it required the presence of five oranges to add two and
three to make five.)
The way the mind works, from the perspective of “early Bion,”
centrally involves alpha-function – the function of transforming raw
sensory data (termed “beta-elements”) into units of meaningful expe-
rience (termed “alpha-elements”) which can be linked in the process
of thinking and stored as memory. As I have previously discussed
(Ogden, 2003a), for Bion, dreaming is a form of alpha-function.
Dreaming is not a reflection of the differentiation of the conscious
and unconscious mind, but the psychological activity/function which
generates that differentiation (and consequently is responsible for the
maintenance of sanity itself). If one is unable to transform raw sensory
data into unconscious elements of experience (alpha-elements), one
is unable to dream, unable to differentiate being awake and dreaming;
consequently, one is unable to go to sleep and unable to wake up:
“hence the peculiar condition seen clinically when the psychotic
patient behaves as if he were in precisely this state” (Bion, 1962a,
p. 7). (See Ogden, 2003a, for a detailed clinical illustration of analytic
work related to the state of not being able to dream.)
I have elected to discuss briefly Bion’s theory of functions not only
because it represents a critically important aspect of Bion’s thinking,
but, as important, because it serves as an illustration of the sort of
work involved in reading early Bion. The reader must move with
Bion as he borrows the concept of function from mathematics and
symbolic logic and in so doing moves analytic theory-making to a
very high level of abstraction. (This aspect of reading Bion strongly
carries over to the experience of reading his theory of transforma-
tions and his conception of the grid in his late work.) At the same
time, he replaces familiar psychoanalytic models and terminology
(e.g. Freud’s topographic and structural models and Klein’s concep-
tion of the paranoid schizoid and depressive positions) with inten-
tionally meaningless terms such as alpha-function, beta-elements and
alpha-elements. Moreover, as if this were not sufficiently dislocating
for the reader, Bion alters the meanings of everyday words that the
reader thought he understood (for instance, the idea of dreaming,
going to sleep and waking up).
What is involved in the experience of reading early Bion includes
an oscillation between clarification of obscurities and the obscuring
of clarifications in a progressive hermeneutic cycle. In addition, the
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experience of learning from the reading of that work has something

of an Alice in Wonderland quality. The whole world of psychoanalytic
theory feels different as one reads Bion because it is different. Words
and ideas once familiar are made foreign, and the foreign made
“familiar” (“of the family” of psychoanalytic ideas). How fundamen-
tally different current analytic theory and practice is as a consequence
of Bion’s early work: for instance, the notion of the patient’s attacks
on his own meaning-generating function (i.e. his capacity for
thinking, feeling, dreaming and so on); the conception of the patient’s
attacks on the analyst’s capacity for reverie; and the delineation of
forms of countertransference acting out in which the analyst fearfully
and defensively attacks his own and/or the patient’s capacity to think.
Bion on reading late Bion
In approaching Bion’s late work I will again make use of some of his
comments on how he would like his work to be read as a port of
entry into his thinking – this time, focusing on Attention and
Interpretation (1970). A problem posed by Bion’s later work is imme-
diately apparent in the “advice” that he offers the reader early in that
book. Just as the experience of reading served as a medium in which
learning from experience was brought to life in Bion’s early work, so
too, in Attention and Interpretation, the living experience in reading1 is
used to convey what cannot be said in words and sentences:
the reader must disregard what I say until the O of the experience
of reading has evolved to a point where the actual events of reading
issue in his [the reader’s] interpretation of the experiences. Too
great a regard for what I have written obstructs the process I repre-
sent by the terms ‘he becomes the O that is common to himself
and myself’.
(1970, p. 28)
1 The difference between thinking about an experience and being in an experience is a recur-
rent theme in Attention and Interpretation, particularly as it relates to the impossibility of
becoming an analyst by learning about analysis; one must be in psychoanalysis – one’s
own and the analyses one conducts – to be genuinely in the process of becoming a
psychoanalyst.
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The reader is thrown directly into the fire of not knowing and is
advised not to evade this state by holding “too great a regard for what
I have written.” And at the same time, the question is inescapable:
What does Bion mean by “the O” of an experience? He uses such
terms as “the thing in itself,” “the Truth,” “Reality,” and “the expe-
rience” to convey a sense of what he has in mind by O. But since
Bion also insists that O is unknowable, unnamable, beyond human
apprehension, these nouns are misleading and contrary to the nature
of O. In introducing O to the analytic lexicon, Bion is not proposing
another reality “behind” the apprehensible one; he is referring to the
reality of what is, a reality that we do not create, a reality that precedes
and follows us, and is independent of any human act of knowing,
perceiving or apprehending.
The language Bion uses in offering thoughts about reading his late
work suggests that the reader is best armed with capacities for the
negative. What cannot be known can be addressed only in terms of
what it is not: “The reader must disregard what I say” and not hold
“too great a regard for what I have written.” The “instructions” to
the reader in Learning from Experience were founded in part on the
notion that the reader must let go of what he thought he knew in
order to enter a progressive cycle of knowing and not knowing. In
contrast, Bion’s instructions in Attention and Interpretation focus on
“disregard[ing]” what Bion is saying altogether, for such adherence to
statements about experience obstructs the reader’s access to the actual
events [the O of the experience] of reading.
The reader is told that if he is able to remain in the experience of
reading, his state of mind will “issue in his [the reader’s] interpreta-
tion of the experiences” (p. 28). The word “experiences” is ambig-
uous in a critically important way: the word refers both to the analytic
experiences he (Bion) has had with his patients, who are now the
subject of his text, and to “the experiences” the reader is having in
reading the text. Bion’s experiences in analysis are conveyed not by
writing about those experiences, but by using language in such a way
that his experiences in analysis become the reader’s experiences in
reading. To the extent that the writing works, the irreducible, unver-
balizable essence, the O, of each of the two experiences – Bion’s
experiences in reading his patients and the reader’s experience in
reading Bion – becomes at one with (“common to”) the another.
The reader “becomes the O that is common to himself [his experi-
ences in reading] and myself [Bion’s experiences in the analyses that
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Reading Bion
he has conducted]” (p. 28). I am aware that in the previous sentences,

I am using the term O without having defined it. To my mind, this
is the only way one can fruitfully approach the concept of O – by
allowing its meanings to emerge (its effects to be experienced) as one
goes. The effects are ephemeral and survive only as long as the present
moment, for no experience can be stored and called up again. We
register experience (O) and are altered by it; we hold experience (O)
in our being, not in our memory.
Bion’s choice of the word “interpretation” in his advice to the
reader – “the actual events of reading issue in his interpretation of the
experiences” – is unexpected given that the passage strongly privi-
leges “being in” as opposed to “speaking about.” But there is no
getting around Bion’s use of the nettlesome word “interpretation,”
which inescapably focuses on the analyst’s formulation of what is true
to the emotional experience occurring between patient and analyst.
What Bion is struggling to convey, I believe, is that psychoanalysis is
most fundamentally an enterprise involving “the emergence” (p. 28)
into the realm of knowing (K)2 of the unsymbolizable, unknowable,
inexpressible experience itself. Bion’s use of the word “emergence”
lies at the core of an understanding of the relationship between the
experience – the unknowable and unsymbolizable (O) – and the
symbolizable, apprehensible dimensions of experience (K).
An emergence is “an unforeseen experience” (OED). In terms of
the relationship between O and K, experiences in K (i.e. experiences
of thinking, feeling, perceiving, apprehending, understanding,
remembering and bodily sensing) are “evolutions of O” (p. 27). Such
evolutions of O are “unforeseeable” in the same way that conscious-
ness is a wholly unforeseeable emergence from the electrical and
chemical workings of the brain. There is absolutely nothing in the
study of the physiology of the brain that would lead one to anticipate
the experience of human consciousness. Similarly, there is nothing in
the structure and physiology of the eye and its myriad connections
with the brain that would allow us to anticipate the experience of
vision.
2 K is a sign used by Bion (1962a) – as I interpret him – to refer not to the noun knowledge
(a static body of ideas), but to knowing (or getting to know), i.e. the effort to be
receptive to and give apprehensible form (however inadequate) to what is true to an
experience (O).
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The idea of “emergence” as a philosophical concept involves a

conception of an interplay of forces at one level of complexity (e.g.
neuronal clusters) that results in the generation of genuinely novel
qualities (e.g. consciousness or vision) that are impossible to antici-
pate through the study of the individual units of either of the two
levels of complexity (Tresan, 1996; Cambray, 2002). Though there
is no evidence that Bion was familiar with this strand of philosophical
thought (developed by a group of British philosophers in the first half
of the twentieth century [McLaughlin, 1992]), to my mind, the phil-
osophical concept of emergence closely corresponds to Bion’s (1970)
notion of the “emergence” (p. 28) or “evolution” (p. 27) of O in the
realm of apprehensible, “sensible” experience (K).
In contrast to the apprehensible evolutions/emergences of O in K,
the experience itself (O) simply is. The only verb suited to follow the
sign O is some form of the verb to be; an experience in O is an
experience of being and becoming. The interpretation as an act
of becoming draws on and allows itself to be shaped by what is.
One recognizes the truth when one hears it in music, sees it in
sculpture, senses it in an analytic interpretation or a dream. One
cannot say what it is, but in sculpture, for example, the sculptor
creates aesthetic gestures that direct the viewer toward O; in psycho-
analysis, the analyst and analysand make “things” (analytic objects
such as interpretations) in verbal and non-verbal form that emerge
from, and gesture toward, what is true to the present emotional
experience.
The O (the truth of what is) is highly specific to the emotional
situation generated by a particular analyst and a particular patient at a
given moment of analysis. And, at the same time, the truth of what
is (the O of that experience) involves a truth that holds for all human-
kind from the “past unknown to us . . . [to the] whole present . . .
which envelops us all; . . . [to the] future as yet uncreated” (Borges,
1984, p. 63).3 The O of these universal truths is emergent in and
constitutive of our very being and traverses all time, for truth and
time are related only by coincidence. In this sense, O is that set of
inarticulate, universal human truths that we live, but do not know; it
3 For both Bion and Borges the future is already alive in the present as “the as-yet unknown”
(Bion, 1970, p. 11); the future casts its shadow backwards on the present (Bion, 1976;
Ogden, 2003b).
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Reading Bion
is what we hear in music and poetry, but cannot name; it is who we

are in dreaming, but cannot communicate in the telling of the dream.
O is a state of being-in-the-present-moment, a moment that “Is
too present for the senses, / too crowding, too confusing – / too
present to imagine” (Frost, 1942b, p. 305). Our capacity for being-
in-the-present is “obstructed” by the humanly understandable wish
to protect ourselves from its blinding glare. We seek shelter from the
O of the present moment in the shadows of memories of what we
think we know because it has already been, and in our projections of
the past into the future.
It is not surprising, given what I have said, that interpretations that
“issue from” the experiences of reading late Bion (or from experi-
ences with a patient in analysis) will inevitably be disappointing and
will involve a sense of loss. Bion (1975) has observed that interpreta-
tions are regularly followed by a feeling of depression (I would say
sadness). What has been lost in the interpretation is the ineffable,
inexpressible quality of what is true to the emotional experience.
The literary critic Lionel Trilling (1947), in response to the question,
“What does Hamlet mean?” stated that Hamlet does not mean
“anything less than Hamlet” (p. 49). Hamlet is Hamlet; O is O; “The
world unfortunately is real; I unfortunately am Borges” (Borges,
1962, p. 234).
In sum, Bion’s late work requires a type of reading quite different
from what is demanded by his early work. Reading the earlier work
involves experiencing a cycle in which obscurities are progressively
clarified; those clarifications are then reopened to new confusions
that demand further clarifications of a sort that lend coherence (at a
greater depth) to the experience of reading, and so on. The overall
“shape” of dialectical movement is that of movement toward a never
attained convergence of sets of meanings. And at the same time,
reading early Bion includes a hefty dose of the experience of strange
brilliance and brilliant strangeness – for example, his concept of beta-
elements, alpha-function, the idea of being unable to fall asleep or
wake up, and the application of mathematical concepts to psycho-
analysis.
Bion’s later work provides a markedly different experience in
reading. If reading early Bion is an experience of movement toward
convergence of disparate meanings, the experience of reading late Bion
is an experience of movement toward an infinite expansion of meaning.
In reading late Bion one must push oneself to one’s limits, and then
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some, in an effort to sustain a state of active receptivity to every possible

experience in reading. If reading early Bion is an experience of learning
from experience, reading late Bion is an experience of disencumbering
oneself of the deliberate use of all that one has learned from experience
in order to be receptive to all that one does not know: “There is
nothing more to be said about what you [the analyst] are prepared for;
what you know, you know – we needn’t bother with that. We have
to deal with all that we don’t know” (Bion, 1978, p. 149).
I will conclude this section of the chapter with two brief observa-
tions. First, it might be said that the reading of early Bion and the
reading of late Bion are experiences that stand in dialectical tension
with one another. But, on the basis of what I have discussed thus far,
I believe that it is more accurate to describe the two experiences in
reading as fundamentally different in nature. The two stand as
different “vertices” (Bion, 1970, p. 93) from which to enter into an
experience (whether it be an analytic experience with a patient
or the reading of a text describing an analytic experience). They
supplement one another as opposed to conversing with one another.
Second, in reading late Bion, it is important to bear in mind that
O is not a philosophical, metaphysical, mathematical or theological
conception; it is a psychoanalytic concept. Bion is exclusively inter-
ested in the psychoanalytic experience: he is concerned only with the
analyst’s task of overcoming what he knows in order to be at one
with what is, the O of the analytic experience at any given moment.
His conception of the analytic state of mind (reverie) is one in which
the analyst makes himself as open as possible to experiencing what is
true and attempts to find words to convey something of that truth to
the patient. Transcendence of self on the part of the analyst is by no
means an end in itself and is of no use whatever to the patient; the
analyst’s task is that of saying something “relatively truthful” (Bion,
1982, p. 8) regarding the emotional experience occurring at any
given moment of the analysis which the patient might be able to use
consciously and unconsciously for purposes of psychological growth.
A preface to an analytic experience
Before offering a clinical example illustrating the use in analytic prac-

tice of some of the ideas discussed above, it is necessary to introduce
one additional concept (taken from Bion’s late work) which, for me,
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Reading Bion
represents a critical bridge between Bion’s conception of the way the

mind works and the experiential level of the psychoanalytic process.
What I am referring to is a distinction that Bion makes in Attention
and Interpretation between two types of remembering:
We are familiar with the experience of remembering a dream; this

must be contrasted with dreams that float into the mind unbidden
and unsought and float away again as mysteriously. The emotional
tone of this experience is not peculiar to the dream: thoughts also
come unbidden, sharply, distinctly, with what appears to be unfor-
gettable clarity, and then disappear leaving no trace by which they
can be recaptured. I wish to reserve the term ‘memory’ for experi-
ence related to conscious attempts at recall. These [conscious
attempts at recall] are expressions of a fear that some element,
‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’, will obtrude.
(1970, p. 70)
For Bion, “memory” is an anxiety-driven use of the mind that

interferes with the analyst’s capacity to be receptive to what is true to
the emotional experience, the O of that experience, as lived in the
present moment. By contrast,
Dream-like memory is the memory [memories that float into the

mind unbidden] of psychic reality and is the stuff of analysis . . .
the dream and the psycho-analyst’s working material both share a
dream-like quality.
(ibid., pp. 70–71)
Thus, when the analyst is doing genuine analytic work, he is not

“remembering,” that is, not consciously attempting to know/under-
stand/formulate the present by directing his attention to the past.
Rather, he is experiencing the analysis in a “dream-like” way – he is
dreaming the analytic session. An analyst consulting with Bion (1978)
commented that she found his observations to be of such great value
that she worried that she would not be able to remember them all.
Bion replied that he hoped she would not remember anything of
what he had said, but that it would make him happy if one day while
in an analytic session, something of what had occurred in the consul-
tation came back to her in a way that felt like an unexpected recol-
lection of a dream and perhaps that dream-like remembering might
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be of help to her in saying something to the patient that he or she

could make use of.
On not being “an analyst”
Mr. B, during a phone call in which we set up our first meeting, told
me that he did not want analysis. In the initial session, he repeated his
wish not to be in analysis and added that he had seen “the school
shrink” while in college for a few sessions for insomnia, but could
not remember the man’s name. I chose not to ask for clarification of
what Mr. B meant by “analysis” and why he was so set against it. My
decision to desist from intervening in this way was based on a sense
that to have done so would have been to ignore what this patient was
trying very hard to tell me: he did not want me to be “an analyst”
without a name, an analyst who conducted himself in a manner that
represented the outcome of his experience with other patients. In my
work with him, I was not to be who I thought I was or who I previ-
ously had been to any other person or to myself.
At the end of the first session, I suggested possible times to meet
again later in the week. Mr. B opened his appointment book and told
me which of the times would be best for him. I continued this method
of arranging one future meeting at a time over the next several months;
it seemed to suit Mr. B in that period of our work. In the course of
the first several months, a schedule of daily meetings became estab-
lished. In the second or third session, I told Mr. B that I thought I
would be able to work best with him if he used the couch; we began
working in that manner in the subsequent session. Mr. B told me that
using the couch was a little strange, but it suited him too.
The patient at first said almost nothing about the present circum-
stances of his life, including how old he was. He mentioned his wife,
but it was not clear how long they had been married, what sort of
marriage it was or whether they had any children. I did not feel any
inclination to inquire; his way of being with me, and my way of
being with him, at that juncture seemed to be a more important form
of communication than could be achieved through my making
inquiries. When, on occasion, I did ask a question, the patient
responded politely and earnestly, but the questions and responses
seemed only to distract Mr. B and me from the task of introducing
ourselves to one another at an unconscious level.
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Reading Bion
The “patient” – an odd word because Mr. B was not a patient in

a way that was familiar to me – never told me why he had come to
see me. I do not think he himself knew. Instead, he told me “stories”
of events in his life that were important to him, but which did not
“make a point” in the sense of illustrating a dilemma or describing a
form of psychological pain concerning which he needed or wanted
my help. I found his stories interesting: Mr. B regularly surprised me
in that in his accounts he portrayed himself as a person who is just a
little removed and a little “off” in an utterly unselfconscious (and
endearing) way. For example, he told me that when he was in fourth
grade, there was a new girl, L, in his class who had recently moved
to the town in which he grew up. Her father had died the previous
year, a fact that Mr. B found “riveting, mysterious and incomprehen-
sible.” He and L became very attached to one another; their relation-
ship continued through the end of high school and into their first
year of college. It was “very intense and very stormy.”
An incident from this long relationship with L stood out in the
patient’s mind. The day after they had gone to a high school dance
together, Mr. B went to L’s house to pick her up for a drive that they
had arranged. When the patient rang the doorbell, L’s mother came
to the door and told him that L was not home. Mr. B stood there for
a moment, frozen with disbelief. He told me that he then got into his
car and drove for hours, screaming in pain at the top of his lungs.
Mr. B went on to say that L, years later, had told him that she had
felt so embarrassed about having been hung over from drinking with
some girlfriends after he had dropped her off that she had asked her
mother to tell him that she was not at home.
In my interventions during the first year or so of the analysis, I
used words very close to those used by the patient, but with the
emphasis shifted just a bit. For instance, in response to the account of
L’s mother’s having told Mr. B that L was not at home, I said, “How
could you have known what was happening if you weren’t being
told the truth?” In speaking in this way, I was putting into words an
idea and a set of feelings that addressed a good deal of what was
happening in that phase of the analysis: I was underscoring the enor-
mous importance to Mr. B of saying what is true. I took the story of
L’s mother’s lie as an unconscious expression of the patient’s feeling
that I could hurt him deeply by not being truthful with him, by
playing the role of analyst as opposed to being myself as his analyst.
My comment to Mr. B was in part informed by a story he had told
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me months earlier: during a conversation that took place in a tene-

ment, an albino cockroach scurried across Mr. B’s notepad. The
patient said in a matter-of-fact way that he had not been bothered by
the cockroach: “Where else would a cockroach live if not in a tene-
ment? I was the visitor, not him.”
As Mr. B spoke of L’s mother’s lie, I wondered what I would do
if one of my sons, during his high school years, had asked me to lie
to one of his close friends. I could not imagine doing so, except
under extraordinary circumstances. My mind wandered to a set of
experiences with G, my best friend when we were ten or eleven
years old. His family had moved to the United States from Australia
only a couple of years earlier. I recalled G’s habit of greatly exagger-
ating a story in his telling of it. When confronted with irrefutable
evidence of his exaggeration, he would say, “I were only kidding.” I
was aware even as a child that G was using the word “were” instead
of the word “was,” and with that one exception, he said things the
same way the rest of us did (albeit with an Australian accent). I found
his habit of distorting the truth to be embarrassing in its desperate-
ness. This was a particularly painful memory for me during the session
with Mr. B because it was so closely linked with memories of my
own acts of dishonesty in childhood which were still a source of
shame for me. There had been a number of occasions when I had
shown off to G’s mother by mentioning a book I had read or a piece
of national news I had heard about. I had not felt the need to posture
in this way with the parents of any other of my friends. I remem-
bered, too, how surprised I was that G called his mother by her first
name. I emerged from this reverie with a deep sense of sadness for G,
who had lived under such enormous pressure (both internal and
external) to be someone he was not for his mother. Who he was –
and who I was – was simply not good enough.
As my attention returned to Mr. B, he was telling me about riding
his bicycle to school when he was about ten years old. He would stop
periodically along the way and put a leaf or a stone or a bottle cap in
a particular place – for example, between the boards of an old fence
or in a cave that was “no more than a dug-out hole under a big rock.”
On the way home from school, he would retrieve these objects.
Mr. B recalled with pleasure the feel of the wind on his face as he rode
home on his bicycle and the feeling of amazement he felt that during
the whole time that he was in school these things were there “spending
the day doing something else” and were waiting for him on his way
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Reading Bion
home. It seemed that the important thing about this childhood expe-
rience was the sense of security that Mr. B derived from knowing
these things were alive (alive with meaning) just as he was alive in his
own being at school. The carefully placed objects had an existence
that went on in his absence: the stone and the leaf and the bottle cap
went on being what they were. As Mr. B was telling me the story, the
sound and cadences of his words reminded me of lines from a Borges
(1957) prose poem: “All things long to persist in their being; the stone
eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger” (p. 246).
In listening to Mr. B’s story about the stones and leaves and bottle
caps remaining themselves while he was at school (in conjunction
with my reverie regarding G and his mother), it occurred to me that
Mr. B had been frightened as a child – and now with me – that his
connection with his mother (and me) felt thin, not based on truths
that remain true, truths that can be taken utterly for granted, love
that remains love, a mother who persists in her being as a mother all
the time. I said to Mr. B, “It seems to me that you felt – although
I don’t know if you would put it this way – that L’s mother was not
being motherly either to L or to you in lying to you. There is some-
thing about being a mother that doesn’t go together with lying. It’s
not a matter of ethics or sentimentality; it’s a feeling that a mother,
when she’s being a mother, is telling the truth, she is the truth.”
Mr. B and I were silent for a few minutes until the end of the session.
Some months later, as Mr. B was beginning to be able to speak
more directly about feelings, he told me that as a child, there were
long stretches of time during which he felt frightened that he would
come home and find that his mother had been taken over by aliens
– she would no longer be his mother even though she looked exactly
like his mother. He would try to devise questions, the answers to
which only his real mother would know. He said, “I remember
vividly that fear that I felt as a kid and only now recognize the lone-
liness that went with it. But at this moment, all I feel is cold – not
distant or remote, but physically cold, as if the temperature in the
room has suddenly dropped by 25 degrees.”
Discussion
The work with Mr. B began with an unconscious request that I not
be a generic analyst, and instead be a person capable of not knowing
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who I am and who he is. Only in that way would I be able to be

open to what I do not know, i.e. to the O of who he is (and of who
I am with him). If I was to be of any help to Mr. B, I would have to
invent a psychoanalysis that bore his name, his being (in contrast to
the therapy provided by his previous therapist, who had no name,
i.e. who did not make a therapy with Mr. B that had their names
on it).
Mr. B’s unconscious request was a reasonable one – and every
patient makes it – but for him, it held particular significance that
derived from his own life experience including his relationship with
his mother. Her state of being-his-mother felt not only unreliable,
but untrue to him. In the early part of the analysis, this quality of his
experience of his mother was brought to life in a great many forms.
He unconsciously communicated to me through his unique way of
being with me the importance to him of people being genuinely
(truthfully) present with one another. He refused to adapt himself to
what he imagined to be the prescribed form in which he was to take
the role of a patient consulting a doctor concerning a malady for
which he was seeking treatment. Rather, he seemed just to be there
and I was to respond only to who he was. It was his being (the O of
who he was) that I was to experience, not a pre-packaged substitute
for O in the form of my preconceptions (or his) about analysis. My
efforts to do so, for instance by setting up only one meeting at a time,
did not feel like a contrivance, but rather as the way it had to be
and should be with Mr. B at that point. I listened (with genuine
interest) to his stories without trying to ferret out what the story was
“really about”; the story was not about anything; the story was the
story; O is O.
I attempted to speak to Mr. B in a way that emerged from what
was true to the emotional experience that was occurring. In speaking
of the lie that L’s mother told the patient, I spoke of the confusion,
the inability to think, in the face of a lie: “How could you have
known what was happening if you weren’t being told the truth?”
Every interpretation that an analyst makes is directed to his own
experience as well as that of the patient. In this instance, my interpre-
tation served as a starting point for a reverie involving G’s desperate
exaggerations and my own feelings of shame concerning my own
childhood emotional dishonesty (posturings). My feelings of shame
were followed by sadness regarding G’s (and my own) sense of inad-
equacy in the eyes of his mother. His ungrammatical use of the word
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Reading Bion
“were” in his saying “I were only kidding,” in retrospect, seems to

have been a complex event reflecting the breakdown of language and
thinking in the face of his own efforts to become a lie, i.e. to be
someone other than who he was. Perhaps also the word “were” in
his statement represented a strangulated beginning of a plea to his
mother, a wish that she were a different kind of mother, a mother
who could sincerely love him as he was, not as she wished he were.
Reverie, like dreaming, while often involving great complexity of
feeling, is nonetheless a form of unmediated or barely mediated
experience. In reveries and dreams there is almost nothing of a reflec-
tive self. Even when an apparently observing self is a figure in a
dream, that figure has no greater powers of observation than any
other figure in the dream (including the narrator). In this sense, I
view reverie as an experience of what is at an unconscious level in the
analytic relationship – the O of the unconscious of the analyst and
analysand living in the experience of the unconscious analytic third
(Ogden, 1994a, 1994b, 1999). The reverie concerning my friend G
and his mother was not about the unconscious events occurring in the
analysis at that point – it was the O of the unconscious experience at
that point.
Mr. B’s response to my interpretation concerning his inability to
know what was happening in the face of a lie took the form of his
telling me a story about his way of reassuring himself as a child that
things (and, by extension, people) remain true to who they are when
out of sight. (As time went on, the patient’s stories became more
layered with meaning, for example, as reflected in the way the story
of the hidden stones and leaves lent itself more naturally to verbally
symbolic interpretation.)
I spoke to Mr. B in terms of the feelings and images that he had
introduced (and in terms of feelings that I had experienced in my
reverie). I told him that I thought he felt that L’s mother had not
been a mother to L or to him in lying to him and that being a mother
is somehow to be what is true. Of course, I was also saying indirectly
that being an analyst is somehow to be what is true, i.e. that it is my
job to attempt to become and say the truth, the O of the emotional
experience at a given juncture of the analysis. (The knowledge that
the analyst cannot possibly succeed in this effort to say and be what
is true was addressed by Bion in response to the self-criticism of an
analyst who was presenting a session to him. The analyst was chas-
tising herself for the inadequacy of her interpretations. Bion, nearly
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80 at the time, commented: “If you had been practising analysis as

long as I have, you wouldn’t bother about an inadequate interpreta-
tion – I have never given any other kind. That is real life – not
psycho-analytic fiction” [1975, p. 43].)
It seems fitting to conclude this chapter with a mention of Mr. B’s
comments about his childhood fear that he would find that his
mother was no longer really his mother. His experience in the anal-
ysis at that juncture captures something of the difference between, on
the one hand, remembering an experience (his recollecting his
childhood fear and loneliness), and on the other, becoming the
O of the experience (his feeling chilled, his becoming that chilling
experience).
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7
Elements of analytic style
Bion’s clinical seminars
For some years now, it has seemed to me that important aspects of

my way of practising psychoanalysis are better described as an analytic
style than as an analytic technique. Though style and technique are
inseparable, for the purposes of the present discussion, I will use the
term analytic technique to refer to a way of practising analysis that has
been, to a large extent, developed by a branch or group of branches
of one’s analytic ancestry, as opposed to being a creation of one’s
own. By contrast, analytic style is not a set of principles of practice,
but a living process that has its origins in the personality and experi-
ence of the analyst.
The term analytic style, as I am using it, puts equal emphasis on
the word analytic as on the word style. Not every style that an
analyst may adopt is analytic, and not every way of practising psycho-
analysis bears the unique mark (the “style”) of the analyst. The idea
of analytic style places greater emphasis than does the concept of
analytic technique on the role of (1) the analyst’s use of, and capacity
to speak from, the unique qualities of his personality; (2) the
analyst’s making use of his own experience as analyst, analysand,
parent, child, spouse, teacher, student, friend and so on; (3) the
analyst’s ability to think in a way that draws on, but is independent
of, the analytic theory and clinical technique of his analyst, supervi-
sors, analytic colleagues and analytic ancestors; the analyst must
learn analytic theory and technique so thoroughly that one day he
will be able to forget them (Ogden, 2005a); and (4) the responsibility
of the analyst to invent psychoanalysis freshly with each patient
(Ogden, 2004a).
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The analyst’s style is a living, ever-changing way of being

with himself and the patient. The entirety of the analyst’s style is
present in every session with every patient; and yet, particular
elements of his style play a greater role than others with any
given patient in any given session. Analytic style infuses the specific
ways the analyst conducts himself in the analysis. Style shapes
and colors method, and method is the medium in which style comes
to life.
My thinking about analytic style has been strongly influenced by
Bion’s work. Of all of Bion’s published contributions, the “Clinical
seminars” (1987), for me, provide the richest and most extensive
access available to Bion the clinician. In the present chapter, I will
offer close readings of three of the clinical seminars. I will describe
what I view as Bion’s unique analytic style, and in so doing illustrate
what I mean by the idea of analytic style.
In the decade between the publication of his last major psycho-
analytic work, Attention and Interpretation (1970), and his death
in 1979, Bion conducted two series of clinical seminars: 24 in
Brasilia in 1975, and 28 in São Paulo in 1978. In these seminars,
in addition to the analyst who presented a case to Bion, there were
six or seven other seminar members, as well as a translator. The
seminars were tape recorded, but it was not until 1987 that the
collected, transcribed and edited version was published. I believe
that despite the fact that in the seminars Bion is the supervisor
and group leader, the “Clinical seminars” nonetheless afford the
reader a rare opportunity to view Bion, the clinician, at work. As
will be seen, even though Bion is not the analyst for the
presenter’s patient, he is the analyst for the patient being “dreamt up”
in the clinical seminar. (I have previously discussed the idea that the
patient presented in analytic supervision is “a fiction,” an imaginary
patient dreamt up by analyst and supervisor, as opposed to the actual
person with whom the analyst converses in his consulting room
[Ogden, 2005a, 2006].) In addition, in the clinical seminars, Bion
does analytic work both with the presenter and with the seminar
group.
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Analytic style in Bion’s clinical seminars
Three clinical seminars
A patient who feared what the analyst might do

(Brasilia, 1975, Seminar No. 1)
The seminar opens with the following exchange:
Presenter: I would like to discuss a session I had today with a thirty-

year-old woman. She came into the consulting room and
sat down; she never lies on the couch. She smiled and
said, “Today I won’t be able to stay sitting here.” I asked
her what that meant; she said she was very agitated. I
asked her what she considered as being very agitated. She
smiled and said, “My head is dizzy.” She said her thoughts
were running away, running over one another. I suggested
that when she felt like that she also felt that she was los-
ing control of her body. She smiled and said, “Perhaps; it
looks as if that were true.” When I continued, suggesting
that when her mind was running away like that, her body
had to follow her mind’s movements, she interrupted me,
saying, “Now, don’t you try to make me stand still.”
Bion: Why should this patient think that the analyst would do
anything? You cannot stop her coming or send her away;
she is a grown woman and presumably therefore free to
come and see you if she wants to; if she doesn’t want to,
she is free to go away. Why does she say that you would
try to stop her doing something? I am not really asking
for an answer to that question – although I would be very
glad to hear any answer that you have – but simply giving
an example of what my reaction is to this story.
(Bion, 1987, pp. 3–4 )
[Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent page numbers cited refer to

Bion, 1987, “Clinical seminars”]
Bion inquires, “Why should this patient think that the analyst
would do anything?” This question to the presenter is, for me, quite
startling and more than a bit odd. Of the innumerable aspects of
the clinical material presented, why is Bion asking about why the
patient would think that the analyst would take action? Only after
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considerable reflection did it occur to me that Bion is suggesting that

the presenter ask himself: What kind of thinking is the patient
engaging in? Why is she thinking in this particular way? Bion is
drawing attention to the fact that the patient is engaged in a very
limited sort of thinking in which elements of experience that might
(under other circumstances) be transformed into thoughts and feel-
ings, in this instance are being experienced and expressed in the
medium of action. The analyst’s thoughts are being treated as actions
(active forces emanating from the analyst) that hold the power to get
the patient to do (not think) something. So the question, “Why
should the patient think that the analyst would do anything?” is, at its
core, a question concerning the way in which the patient is attempting
to handle the emotional problem of the moment, and, perhaps, of
the entire session: her fear that she is losing her mind.
The patient’s evacuation of her unthinkable thought (her fear that
she is going mad) has precipitated a rift with external reality in the
form of the delusional belief that the analyst is trying to do something
to her, i.e. “to make me stand still.” If the analyst is too frightened to
take seriously the patient’s statement that she believes in a very
concrete way that he is trying to do something to her, he will
compound the patient’s problems by failing to think/dream (to do
conscious and unconscious psychological work with) the patient’s
delusional experience (Bion, 1962a).
Bion, in “simply giving an example of what my reaction is to this
story,” is giving an unobtrusive interpretation to the presenter. The
presenter offered the patient a verbally symbolized thought that he
hoped would help her to think about her own experience: “I
suggested that when she felt like that [i.e. that her thoughts were
running over one another] she also felt that she was losing control of
her body.” The patient responded by smiling and saying, “Perhaps;
it looks as if that were true.” Her smile (the mention of which has a
chilling effect on me) is followed by a statement that seems to offer
qualified (“Perhaps”) agreement. But the words, “it looks as if that
were true,” in combination with her smile, seem to me to convey
the idea that the analyst sees only what appears to be true, and not
what is in fact true to what the patient is experiencing.
The analyst ignored the patient’s response and repeated his inter-
pretation. The patient interrupted the analyst’s repetition of his inter-
pretation by saying, “Now, don’t you try to make me stand still.”
She might as well have said, “Stop doing that to me. Stop trying to
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make me into you by putting your ideas into my head and in that
way controlling my actions (making me stand still). If that happens, I
won’t be able to move my own mind and body at all.” In asking why
the patient would think that the analyst would do anything, Bion is,
I believe, trying to help the presenter to understand this aspect of the
patient’s psychotic thinking.
The presenter responds at a superficial level to Bion’s question –
“Why should the patient think that the analyst would do anything?”
– by saying,
I was interested to know why she had said “Don’t try to keep me
still”. She said she didn’t know the answer to the question, so I
suggested that she was preoccupied by my being quiet, still. She
said that she did not regard me as being still, but as dominating my
movements, my mind controlling my body.
(p. 4)
The presenter’s inability to use Bion’s question/interpretation

reflected, I believe, his fear of recognizing (thinking) the full extent
of his patient’s psychosis. Because the patient cannot differentiate
mind from body (and herself from the analyst), her saying that she
experienced his mind as dominating his body was, I believe, equiva-
lent to her saying that she experienced his mind as dominating her
body and mind. In other words, he was relentless in his effort to get
into her mind and make her do things (“make me stand still” mentally
and physically).
Bion told the seminar,
I would like to make a guess here as to what I would say to this

patient – not in the first session but later on. “We have here these
chairs, this couch, because you might want to use any of them;
you might want to sit in that chair, or you might want to lie on
that couch in case you feel that you couldn’t bear sitting there – as
you say today. That is why this couch was here when you first
came. I wonder what has made you discover this today. Why is it
only today you have found that you may not be able to sit in that
chair; that you may have to lie down or go away?” All that would
be much more appropriate if she had discovered it at the first
session. But she was too afraid to discover it.
(pp. 4–5)
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This, at first, seems like a very strange thing to say. But I view it as a
reflection of Bion’s analytic style. Only Bion could have said this. If
someone else were to say this, he would be imitating Bion. So what
is Bion doing here, or, to put it in different terms, how is Bion being
Bion-the-analyst here? He is treating the encounter as if it were the
first encounter between him and the patient. He recognizes that the
patient is predominantly psychotic and speaks to her from that
vantage point (thereby recognizing who she is at that moment). For
Bion (1957), the psychotic aspect of the personality is a part of the
self that is unable to think, to learn from experience or do psycho-
logical work.
Speaking to “the non-psychotic part of the patient’s personality”
(Bion, 1957), the part capable of thinking and doing psychological
work, Bion begins by naming in the simplest, most literal terms the
objects that are in the consulting room (which are swirling with
uncontrolled meaning for the patient because she is frightened and
unable to think): “We have here these chairs, this couch, because
you might want to use any of them.” Bion, in this way, not only tells
the patient what the objects are – as external objects – he also tells her
implicitly that they are there for her to use as analytic objects, objects
that may be used in dreaming up an analysis, if she wishes to try to
do so (with his help). He continues: “you might want to sit in that
chair, or you might want to lie on that couch in case you feel that
you couldn’t bear sitting there – as you say today.” Here, Bion tells
the patient that he thinks that she may be frightened of using the
chair today. I believe that Bion is implicitly speculating imaginatively
that the chair, for the patient, is a psychological place that once held
magical power to protect her against what she fears would happen if
she “really” were in analysis. The chair, for some reason, has lost its
power today. She might want to use the couch (i.e. she may want to
try to become the analytic patient who she had hoped to become
when she first came to see the analyst). Bion is not trying to do
something to her or to get her to do something, for example, to use
the chair or the couch; he is attempting to help her to “dream herself
into existence” (Ogden, 2004a) as an analysand and dream him up as
an analyst who may be able to help her to think: “That is why the
couch was here when you first came.”
Bion, in a way that is characteristic of him in the “Clinical semi-
nars,” frames his inquiry in the form of the question, “I wonder what
has made you discover this today?” i.e. how have you discovered that
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this is the emotional problem that is most important for you to solve
in today’s session? He is implicitly adding that he does not have a
solution to the problem, but that she may, and that he may be able to
help her to understand something of the problem that is disturbing
her, but which she, as yet, is unable to think/dream. Further, what
Bion is implicitly saying might be phrased as follows: “In your saying,
‘Today I won’t be able to stay sitting here,’ you are telling me that
you are afraid that you can no longer get help here – you fear that
you have become so mad (‘dizzy’) that you have lost hope of being
able to become a patient who may be able to make use of me as your
analyst.”
Bion continues to wonder aloud: “[So] why is it that only today
you have found that you may not be able to sit in that chair; that you
may have to lie down or go away?” Bion’s interpretation (ostensibly
to the patient) is perhaps more an interpretation to the presenter: the
presenter had not recognized or spoken to the patient about her fear
of not being able to be a patient in analysis, a fear she expressed both
in her stated inability to use either the chair or the couch and in her
statement that the analyst seems to the patient to be able to perceive
only what “looks as if . . . [it] were true.” It now seems clearer to me
why I find the patient’s smile so chilling: it bespeaks the enormity of
the emotional disconnection that the patient was experiencing
between the degree of her emotional distress and her very limited
ability to think/dream it, and between herself and the analyst.
Not long after making this interpretation to the patient (and also
to the presenter), Bion says, “As the analyst, one hopes to go on
improving – as well as the patient . . . If I knew all the answers I
would have nothing to learn, no chance of learning anything . . .
What one wants is to have room to live as a human being who makes
mistakes” (p. 6). This, too, is a fundamental element of Bion’s style
in the “Clinical seminars.” Though time and again, Bion surprises
the presenter and the reader with his uncanny way of sensing the
importance of, and making analytic use of, seemingly insignificant
elements of what is happening in a session, he no less frequently
states, without contrived humility, that an analyst must “have room
to live as a human being who makes mistakes.” Only in this state of
mind is one able to learn from experience: “If you had been prac-
tising analysis as long as I have, you wouldn’t bother about an inad-
equate interpretation – I have never given any other kind. That is
real life – not psycho-analytic fiction” (p. 49).
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Before turning to the next seminar, there is an implicit element of

Bion’s clinical approach in this seminar and in a great many others to
which I would like to draw the reader’s attention: the question that
Bion asks the presenting analyst far more often than he asks any other
question is: Why is the patient coming to analysis? (see, for example,
pp. 20, 41, 47, 76, 102, 143, 168, 183, 187, 200, 225 and 234). It
seems to me that in each instance that Bion poses this question, he is
implicitly asking the presenter to think of the patient as unconsciously
bringing to each session an emotional problem for which he has been
unable to find a “solution” (p. 100), i.e. a problem with which he has
been unable to do psychological work. The patient is unconsciously
asking the analyst to help him to think the disturbing thoughts and
feelings that he is unable to think and feel on his own. Though Bion,
in the seminar just discussed, does not explicitly ask the presenter
why the patient is coming to analysis, it seems to me that he implic-
itly raises that question several times. The first instance occurs almost
immediately in the seminar when he says, “she is a grown woman
and therefore presumably free to come and see you if she wants to; if
she doesn’t want to, she is free to go away.”
A doctor who was not himself (Brasilia, 1975, Seminar No. 3)
This seminar is quite remarkable in the way that it generates a conver-

sation which affords Bion the opportunity not only to put into words,
but to demonstrate so much of his conception of what it means to be
an analyst. What is more, Bion does so without using a single tech-
nical term. This is consonant with his insistence that we speak to our
patients in “words that are as simple and unmistakable as possible”
(p. 234), in everyday language, “ordinary articulate speech” (p. 144),
and that we, as analysts, talk to one another in the same way.
The analysand being presented is a 24-year-old hospital physician
who has been unable to work for four months. He told the analyst,
“I took the elevator not feeling well. I thought it would be too diffi-
cult to come to the session. I thought that if I stayed here I would
die” (p. 13). The presenter said that the patient then changed the
subject and began to describe his attempt to return to work the
previous day despite intense anxiety.
Bion asked, “Was he physically ill?” (p. 13). Once again, Bion’s
question seems odd, this time because it seems so literal-minded.
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(There is something surprisingly pragmatic about Bion’s way of

listening to the presenters’ accounts of their work with their patients
throughout the “Clinical seminars.”) Perhaps in asking whether the
patient was physically ill, Bion is pointing out that the patient, even
though he says that he was afraid that he was dying, has come to see
an analyst, not a doctor of internal medicine. It must be that his expe-
rience to this point in analysis has led him to feel that the analyst has
helped him and that he and the analysis may be of further help to him.
The presenter responds only to the most superficial level of Bion’s
question by saying, “He thought so [i.e. the patient was consciously
aware only of feeling physically ill] but in fact he was suffering an
anxiety crisis” (p. 13). Bion is unfazed by the presenter’s inability to
understand the observation that was implicit in his question. This
event, though of no great significance in itself, reflects a critical
quality of Bion’s style as a supervisor and (I surmise) as an analyst: he
“speaks past the presenter.” That is, he speaks to that aspect of the
presenter that is able to think – the thinking aspect of the personality,
which Bion, in his theoretical writings, at times calls “the non-
psychotic part of the personality,” and at other times, “the uncon-
scious.” It is this aspect of the personality that is capable of making
use of lived experience for purposes of psychological work and
growth. I will use the terms “speaking past the patient,” “speaking to
the unconscious” and “speaking to the non-psychotic part of the
personality” interchangeably in referring to the analyst’s act of
speaking to the aspect of the patient that is capable of thinking. Since
the conscious aspect of the presenter’s mind is, in the instance being
discussed, not fully able to think, Bion must speak “directly” to the
patient’s unconscious or non-psychotic aspect of personality (see
Grotstein, 2007a, 2007b, for discussions of talking to the patient’s
unconscious).
A member of the seminar then asks whether it might “not be
interesting to interrupt the patient at this point? I feel there is too
much material” (p. 14). Bion responds by saying that he would wait
to say something until he had “a clearer idea of what he [the patient]
was up to” (p.14). He adds,
it’s just a suspicion working in my mind – that this patient is one

of those people who take up medicine because they are so fright-
ened of some catastrophe or disaster. He can then converse with
other doctors and thereby hear about all the diseases there are.
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Then he won’t die, or disasters won’t happen, because he is the

doctor, not the patient.
(p. 14)
The patient, even though he has qualified as a doctor, is not a doctor

because he has no idea about how to genuinely become a doctor, i.e.
how to develop a sense of coming into being as a person who is able
to use his mind to help people (including himself) who are ill.
The same seminar member repeated his question in a slightly
different form: “Is this suspicion of yours one of those things the
analyst should keep to himself, or could he tell the patient?” (p. 14).
Bion makes an interpretation meant for this seminar member, but
couched as a statement concerning the patient. He tells the seminar
member that people can only do psychological work with a bit of
their lived experience and, in particular, analysts early in their career
often feel deluged by frightening experiences with their patients:
A common manifestation of this sort of thing happens when

medical students go to the dissecting room to learn anatomy. They
break down; they can’t go on with it because it causes such an
upheaval in their views and attitudes if they dissect the human
body.
(p. 14)
Bion, I believe, is saying that he suspects that the seminar member

feels compelled to interrupt the flow of thinking (dissecting) in the
seminar for fear of breaking down in the analytic “dissecting room”
(the clinical seminar). Bion’s style of interpretation is highly respectful
of the seminar member’s defenses as well as his dignity. The thinking
that Bion is offering is there to be used if and when the seminar
member is ready to make use of it. Without shaming the seminar
member, the interpretation seems to have been utilizable by him –
his unconscious fear of what he might find out in the seminar was
diminished to the point that he was able not to make further inter-
ruptions of the analytic work that was occurring in the seminar.
Immediately following Bion’s response to the seminar member
just described, the presenter said, “I have the feeling that the
patient didn’t change the subject – he only apparently changed it”
(p. 14). Here the presenter is contradicting his own statement made
only a few moments earlier. I surmise that in the interim he made
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psychological use of the interpretation that Bion made to the seminar

member, i.e. that the analyst’s anxiety may prevent him from listening
to what the patient is unconsciously trying to communicate regarding
his fears.
Bion replies to the presenter:
This feeling of yours is where the interpretation comes from . . .

When you begin to feel that all these different free associations are
not really different ones, because they have the same pattern, then
it becomes important to wait until you know what the pattern is.
(p. 14)
The presenter responds:
In a seminar with a training analyst, the analyst told me that every

good interpretation should contain three elements: a description
of the behaviour of the patient; the function of the behaviour; and
the theory which is behind the behaviour.
(p. 15)
The reader can almost feel Bion’s blood coming to a boil – not in
response to the presenter’s anxiety, but in response to the arrogance
of an analyst who believes that he knows how to do psychoanalysis,
and believes that if his supervisees see things as he does, they, too,
will know how to do psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, Bion’s response
is a measured one, but not completely bleached of his feeling that a
supervisory style of the sort described is destructive to the supervi-
see’s efforts to become an analyst. At the same time, Bion is fully
aware that he is not hearing the ideas of the training analyst (about
whom Bion knows nothing), but the ideas and feelings of the
presenter who, like his own patient, has momentarily retreated from
being a thinking doctor (an analyst) into a passive patient who cannot
think for himself. Bion says:
In a sense these theories, such as the one you mention, have a use
for the particular person who mentions them. [Bion does not
identify that person as the training analyst because he is not
addressing that person. He is addressing a split in the presenter’s
personality in which one aspect of himself – who uses analytic
theory as a way of not thinking – belittles another aspect of himself
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– who is trying to become a thinking analyst.] Some of them

[analytic theories] will also mean something to you. [The thinking
aspect of the presenter may, at times, be able to think about analytic
theories and find them useful to him in developing his own ideas.]
While you are trying to learn, all these things are very confusing.
[Being confused is a state of mind to be experienced as opposed to
being evacuated and replaced by a feeling that one knows how to
do analysis because one has been told how to do so by someone in
authority.] This is why I think you can [Bion does not say, “one
can”] go on too long with training and seminars. It is only after you
have qualified [as an analyst] that you have a chance of becoming
an analyst. The analyst you become is you and you alone; you
have to respect the uniqueness of your own personality – that is
what you use, not all these interpretations [these theories that you
use to combat the fear that you are not really an analyst and do not
know how to become one].
(p. 15)
Bion is demonstrating for the presenter, the seminar members, and

the reader what a genuine analytic conversation sounds like.
Interpretations do not announce themselves as interpretations. They
are a part of “a conversation” (p. 156) in which ideas are stated tact-
fully, respectfully (often as conjectures) in everyday language. It is
becoming clear here that what Bion means by interpretation is not a
statement designed to provide verbal symbolization for repressed
unconscious conflict in an effort to make the unconscious conscious.
Rather, an interpretation is a way of telling the patient a portion of
what the analyst is thinking in a form that the patient may be able to
use in thinking his own thoughts.
The reader of this seminar can hear with his or her own ears what
a person who is able to speak from the uniqueness of his personality
and experience sounds like. No other analyst sounds remotely like
Bion. In the other chapters of this book I discuss the unique ways in
which other major analytic writers speak/write/think in a way that
reflects the uniqueness of his or her personality. It would be very
difficult, even in reading a short passage, not to recognize the distinc-
tive voice of each of these analysts.
The analyst’s ability to speak with humility from the uniqueness of
his personality, from his own “peculiar mentality” (p. 224), lies at the
core of what I am calling the analyst’s style. It must be apparent by
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this time that style is the opposite of fashion; it is also the opposite of
narcissism. Giving oneself over to fashion arises from the wish to be
like others (in the absence of a sense of who one is); narcissism
involves a wish to be admired by others (in an effort to combat one’s
sense of worthlessness).
Following this “digression” in which Bion discusses the difficulties
inherent in becoming an analyst, he asks the presenter to tell him
more about the session:
Presenter: The patient had the impression that if he remained on
duty [as a doctor at the hospital the previous night] he
was going to feel ill. He was not feeling ill – he had the
impression that this was going to happen.
Bion: In other words, he wasn’t going to get cured – he would
get these illnesses. It sounds possible that he has never
really considered that he has to be very tough indeed to be
a doctor at all. In this profession you are always dealing with
people at their worst; they are frightened; they are anxious.
It is no good taking up that occupation if he is going to
end up by being anxious, depressed and frightened too.
(pp. 16–17)
Bion is making an indirect interpretation to the non-psychotic
aspect of the presenter’s personality. Here again, the interpretation has
a surprisingly pragmatic feel to it: the patient has chosen a career for
which he is not emotionally equipped – he seems not to be able to
face other people’s fears without becoming frightened and depressed
himself. But, of course, there is more to the interpretation than that.
Bion is focusing on a striking contradiction that seems to provide a
sense of the nature of the emotional problem for which the patient is
seeking help in this session. Why is the patient presenting the analyst
with a contradiction in this particular way, at this moment? Perhaps
the patient did not simply make a poor career choice. Is there some-
thing about himself (an aspect of himself that is a genuine doctor)
from whom the patient feels disconnected? Bion is noticing a commu-
nication that is so obvious that it is as invisible as Poe’s purloined
letter. Perhaps it is this paradox – that the obvious is invisible – that
makes Bion’s comments sound odd and concrete. Here, as was the
case earlier in the seminar, Bion’s observation concerning something
that feels “off” to him contains an “imaginative conjecture” (p. 191)
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regarding the emotional problem that the patient (with the analyst’s
help) is attempting to “solve” (p. 125), i.e. to think in this session.
The question is not simply, “What is leading the patient to feel anxious
and fearful?” A more specific problem (or facet of the dynamic tension
driving the patient’s symptomatology) is alive in the current session.
Bion, in his comments that address the patient’s choice of profession,
seems to be trying out the idea that the patient may feel that he is not
himself. He chose to try to become a doctor, and yet he feels more
drawn to being a passive patient – a person who knows nothing,
and wishes to know nothing, about the illness from which he is
suffering.
Bion’s speculation might be thought of as an interpretation spoken
to the non-psychotic aspect of his “imaginary” patient, an aspect of
personality that is both unconscious and capable of thinking.
The presenter seems to have been able to make use of this inter-
pretation:
So he left the room to lie down. At this moment he was called to

the emergency ward. He went; he worked perfectly. He thought
it very curious that he could work well without any difficulty.
(p. 17)
It might be argued that the presenter’s account of “what happened

next” constitutes a mere recitation of notes that he had written days
or weeks earlier. I find this idea unconvincing. The presenter could
have said anything in response to Bion’s “interpretation”: for
example, he could have asked a question that would have disrupted
analytic thinking in the seminar or he could have made distracting
comments about the patient’s conscious reasons for seeking medical
training. What the presenter did say involved an unintended, highly
meaningful ambiguity: the word curious is a euphemism for the
patient’s feeling at a loss to account for what happened; and at the
same time the word curious refers to the beginning of the capacity for
thinking (the capacity to be curious about what one does not know).
The former is a much more passive state of mind than the latter. In
his use of the word curious, the presenter conveyed his growing
understanding of the way in which the patient simultaneously wished
to think and was afraid to think.
Bion responds by saying, “He goes off to this emergency, and
instead of having a heart attack or whatever, he finds that he can be
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a doctor” (p. 17). The patient, with the analyst’s help, is finding that
he is able to become a doctor, i.e. a person who is able to think and
to use that capacity to “dream himself into existence” as a doctor and
as an analytic patient. Similarly, with the help of Bion’s interpreta-
tions, the presenter is able to dream himself into existence as a doctor,
i.e. as an analyst. He is becoming able to be curious about the patient,
a person “at his worst” (a person who is anxious and in dire need
of help).
To return to Bion’s response to the patient’s unexpectedly
becoming a genuine doctor, Bion observes,
Using this [event in which the patient became a doctor] not only
for this incident but for many others, you can begin to feel that the
patient may after all be a doctor or a potential analyst if, when it
comes to a crisis, the doctor emerges. But why in a crisis? If it is
really true that he may after all be a doctor, not just by title but the
thing itself, why hasn’t he discovered that until now? . . . Of
course, we believe as analysts – rightly or wrongly – that analysis is
helpful. But this belief is liable to hide from us the extraordinary
nature, the mystery of psychoanalysis. Such a lot of analysts seem
to be bored with their subject; they have lost the capacity for
wonder.
(p. 17)
Two critical elements of Bion’s style are audible in these sentences.

First, we hear Bion, the doctor, the pragmatist, a person for whom
finding “the solution to [the patient’s] problem” (p. 100) matters
greatly. Bion views his responsibility to be that of helping patients – a
rather old-fashioned idea. If we do not believe that analysis is helpful,
why are we spending our lives practising it? How are we to ignore
the patient’s pain, for it is his pain that leads him to seek help from
the analyst? But it does not follow that the analyst’s job is to help
relieve the patient of pain. Quite the opposite. The analyst’s task, for
Bion, is to help the patient to live with his pain long enough to do
analytic work with it. There is some aspect of the patient that comes
to the analyst for analysis. Bion is continually listening for the (often
very muted) voice of that part of the patient and for hints from the
patient concerning what emotional problem this aspect of the patient
is trying to think/solve. If the patient is not using the analyst as an
analyst (for example by behaving as if he expects the analyst to be a
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magician whom will turn the patient into the person who he wishes
to be), Bion asks himself (and often asks the “dreamt-up” patient)
what the patient thinks analysts do. Perhaps second only in frequency
to Bion’s question, “Why has the patient come for analysis?” is his
question, “What does the patient think analysis is?” And he often
comments in response to the patient’s idea, “That is a very strange
conception of analysis.” Helping the patient and giving the patient
the “correct” (p. 162) analysis (a genuine analytic experience) are, for
Bion, one and the same thing.
The second important element of Bion’s analytic style that is alive
in this passage is his feeling that his awareness of how little he knows
is not a source of frustration or disappointment; it is a source of awe
and wonderment in the face of the complexity, the beauty, and the
horror that constitute human nature and human efforts to cope with
and learn from disturbing experience. (See Gabbard, 2007, for a
discussion of the role of analytic orthodoxy and the use of analytic
dogma to evade facing the full complexity and “chaos of the human
condition” [p. 35] and of the analytic enterprise.)
In response to the questions and associations that were elicited in
Bion by the patient’s having begun to develop his capacity for
thinking, the presenter continues:
Later on in the same session he [the patient] asked himself this

question [How did he manage to genuinely become a doctor?]
and said, “If I had known that analysis could do this for me I
wouldn’t have waited for a crisis before coming.”
(p. 17)
The reader can hear in this comment a shift in the balance of power
between the patient as an assailant of his own capacity for thinking,
and the patient as a thinking doctor. The doctor is now able to face
the fact that he is ill while remaining alive to his feelings; he is able
to make use of his awareness of his emotions to give direction to his
thinking; and he is able to use his thinking to become “an analyst”
who actively takes responsibility for his role in his own analysis.
Bion recognizes that the satisfaction to be taken by the patient in
this achievement is balanced by feelings of sadness that are equally
intense: “One of the peculiarities of progress is that it always makes
you feel depressed or regretful that you didn’t discover it sooner”
(p. 17). This interpretation is meant not only for the imaginary
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patient being dreamt up in the seminar, but also for the presenter
who, I think, Bion feels is regretful that it has taken him so long to
become an analyst for his patient. (Perhaps the presenter recognized
in the course of the seminar that he had relied for a long time on the
thinking of others – the “training analyst” in himself – who had been
afraid to respond freshly, without preconception, to what he was
perceiving and feeling in the analytic sessions. In other words, to this
point he had been unable to invent/rediscover psychoanalysis with
this patient.
Still another element of Bion’s analytic style can be felt in this
portion of the seminar. As we have seen, Bion is continually aware
of the way in which each patient in each analytic hour unconsciously
feels that his life is at stake (and, it seems to me, that Bion believes,
in an important sense, that the patient is correct in believing so).
After all, to the extent that a patient cannot think, he cannot be
alive to his experience. But Bion, here, takes a more radical position
than he took earlier regarding the analyst’s use of himself in his effort
to help the patient. What he adds is critical to who Bion is as an
analyst:
You are an analyst, or a father or a mother, because you believe

you are capable of the affection or understanding which is so
necessary but which is felt [by the patient and the child] to be so
unimportant [i.e. it is invisible to them because it is completely
taken for granted, as it should be] . . . It is liable to be lost sight of
that what we, as doctors and psycho-analysts, are concerned with
is helping human beings . . . We may have to upset them in the
course of the analysis, but that is not what we are trying to do.
With this patient it may be very important to show him, when the
time comes, that there exists [in the analyst] some capacity for
affection, sympathy, understanding – not just diagnoses [interpre-
tations] and surgery, not just analytic jargon, but interest in the
person. You can’t make doctors or analysts – they have to be born.
(p. 18)
Bion, in his characteristically understated way, is saying that, for

him, being an analyst involves more than understanding the patient
and communicating to him that understanding in a form that he can
make use of; being an analyst involves, at times, feeling and showing
one’s affection for the patient about whom the analyst cares deeply.
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This is something that one cannot be taught to do; one must be born
with a capacity to do it, and a wish to do it.
A man who was perpetually awake

(Sâo Paulo, 1978, Seminar No. 1)
In this seminar, the patient being presented is a 38-year-old econo-

mist who has a rather mechanical walk and conducts himself in a stiff
manner, for example, by opening a session by saying, “Very well,
Doctor,” or “I have brought you some dreams today” (p. 141).
Bion very soon asks another of his “odd” questions: “Why does he
say they are dreams?” (p. 142). Bion is immediately cutting to the
core of what he believes is the emotional problem with which the
patient is unconsciously asking for help from the analyst: the non-
psychotic aspect of the patient recognizes that the psychotic aspect of
himself is dominating his personality and consequently he cannot
dream. Bion is suggesting with his question that to the extent that the
patient is psychotic, he cannot differentiate dreaming from waking
perception, i.e. he cannot tell whether he is asleep or awake. For
Bion (1962a), the psychotic patient (or aspect of the patient) is unable
to generate and maintain a barrier (the “contact-barrier,” p. 21)
between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind. In the absence
of differentiation between conscious and unconscious mental experi-
ence, the individual “cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up” (p. 7).
He lives in a world in which internally generated perception (hallu-
cination) is undifferentiable both from perception of external events
and from dreaming. Consequently, the patient (in order to protect
himself from this frightening awareness) pretends to be a person who
is interested in dreams.
The presenter, like the reader, has not thought to ask himself why
the patient says he had dreams, what the patient means when he
speaks of having had dreams, and whether or not the patient, at this
moment, knows what a dream is. Nonplussed by Bion’s question,
“Why does he say they are dreams?” the presenter replies, “He simply
tells me so” (p. 142).
The element of Bion’s analytic style to which I am drawing atten-
tion here is his extraordinarily quick wit. In this exchange, he is
casting the presenter as a straight man in a magic show in which Bion
pulls a rabbit out of the presenter’s vest pocket. Bion is perfectly
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straight-faced throughout. Wit is neither an inherently good nor bad

quality of character. How it is used is what matters. At 80, Bion is, in
this instance, playing the role of enigmatic, idiosyncratic, unpredict-
able, razor-sharp old man – a role that seems to suit him. Another
example of Bion’s wit that comes to mind is a comment he made in
Brasilia Seminar No. 8. The presenter told Bion that the patient had
said he had managed to control his envy, but kept moving anxiously
on the couch throughout the session. Bion replied, “He controlled
envy and his envy is extremely annoyed about it” (p. 48).
It is never easy – perhaps it is impossible – to “read” Bion (i.e. to
say with certainty who he “really is” at a given moment). He is a
thoughtful, earnest teacher, fully aware of the limits of his knowledge
and of his personality; and at the same time, he is a man who means
what he says, and a man who invites (and helps) students and patients
to do the same. There is also a reticence to Bion in the “Clinical
seminars.” His wit and enigmatic statements are part, I believe, of an
effort to safeguard the sanctity of his privacy. This, too, is an integral
part of Bion’s analytic style, an integral part of who Bion is as an
analyst and as a person.
A few moments later in the seminar, Bion speaks at greater length
about the question that the patient was raising in his mind:
So why does the patient come to see a psycho-analyst and say he

had a dream? I can imagine myself saying to a patient, “Where
were you last night? What did you see?” If the patient told me he
didn’t see anything – he just went to bed – I would say, “Well, I
still want to know where you went and what you saw.”
(p. 142)
Bion, in this way, is saying to the non-psychotic part of the

patient’s personality that he understands that the patient does not
know when he is awake and when he is asleep. So when the patient
tells him that he went to bed, Bion treats the “dream” as an experi-
ence that has all the qualities of waking-life experience. Bion
continues: “If the patient said, ‘Ah, well, I had a dream’, then I
would want to know why he says it was a dream” (p. 142). By not
accepting the patient’s use of the word dream (which serves to
evade the truth), Bion is helping the non-psychotic aspect of the
patient’s personality to think (which involves facing the reality of the
current hegemony of the psychotic aspect of his personality). Bion is
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implicitly stating his belief that such recognition of the truth of what
is occurring influences the balance of power between the psychotic
and the non-psychotic aspects of the personality.
Bion, shortly after, elaborates on this idea:
when he says that [he had a dream], he is awake and ‘conscious’, as

we call it. So – both the patient and you [the presenter] are in the
same state of mind, and that is not the same state of mind as you or
he are in when asleep. He is inviting you and himself to be preju-
diced in favour of a state of mind in which we are when awake.
(p. 142)
In other words, what the patient is calling dreams, we would call

hallucinations. The patient cannot differentiate visual events that he has
while sleeping from visual perceptions he has when he is “awake.” He
is “inviting you and himself to be prejudiced in favour of a state of
mind in which we are when awake,” i.e. he is trying to convince the
analyst that there is only one state – that of being awake – so that both
patient and analyst can agree that the patient is not psychotic and is
simply reporting what he perceives in a waking state. The patient is
insisting that because there is only one state – that of wakefulness –
there is no difference between perception and hallucination, dream-
life and waking-life; consequently, there is no such thing as psychosis.
The element of Bion’s analytic style with which I am concerned
here is the absolute directness with which he speaks to the (dreamt-
up) patient. He senses almost immediately when the patient is using
words in a way that involves a slippage of meaning that prevents
painful recognition of the truth. Bion, as in the instance under discus-
sion, then speaks to the patient in a way that restores the proper
meaning to words, which in turn allows for thinking and “ordinary
human intercourse” (p. 197) to begin or resume. To be able consist-
ently to hear and respond to such slippages of meaning requires a
very fine ear indeed.
Concluding comments
It is impossible to give an adequate rendering of an analyst’s style

since his style is informed by nothing less than everything that he is
as a person and as an analyst. Though I greatly admire many of the
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qualities of Bion’s analytic style that are brought to life in the “Clinical
seminars,” I do not view his style as a model to emulate. Rather, as
Bion states in the seminars, “The way I do psychoanalysis is of no
importance to anybody excepting myself, but it may give you some
idea of how you do analysis, and that is important” (p. 224).
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8
Reading Loewald
Oedipus reconceived
In the history of psychoanalysis, Freud’s Oedipus complex has been

reinvented several times – for example, by Klein, Fairbairn, Lacan
and Kohut. At the heart of Loewald’s (1979) re-conceptualization of
the Oedipus complex is the idea that it is the task of each new gener-
ation to make use of, destroy and reinvent the creations of the
previous generation. Loewald reformulates the Oedipus complex in
a way that provides fresh ways of viewing many of the fundamental
human tasks entailed in growing up, growing old and, in between
the two, managing to make something of one’s own that succeeding
generations might make use of to create something unique of their
own. Thus, Loewald reinvents Freud’s version of the Oedipus
complex, and it is my task to reconceive Loewald’s version of the
Oedipus complex in the very act of presenting it. By means of a close
reading of Loewald’s (1979) “The waning of the Oedipus complex,”
I will demonstrate what it is about the way Loewald thinks that leads
me to view that paper as a watershed in the development of psycho-
analytic thought.
The sequential nature of writing makes it difficult for Loewald to
capture the simultaneity of the elements of the Oedipus complex;
I, too, must struggle with this dilemma. I have elected to discuss
Loewald’s overlapping ideas in more or less the sequence he presents
them, addressing the tension between influence and originality in the
succession of generations; the murder of the oedipal parents and the
appropriation of their authority; the metamorphic internalization of
the child’s experience of the parents which underlies the formation of
a self responsible for itself and to itself; and the transitional incestuous
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Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived
object relationship which mediates the dialectical interplay between

differentiated and undifferentiated forms of object relatedness. I
conclude with a comparison of Freud’s and Loewald’s conceptions of
the Oedipus complex.
Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex
In order to place Loewald’s contribution in context, I will review the

major tenets of Freud’s Oedipus complex, as I understand them.
Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex is built on a foundation
of four revolutionary ideas: (1) All of human psychology and psycho-
pathology, as well as all human cultural achievements, can be under-
stood in terms of urges and meanings that have their roots in the
sexual and aggressive instincts; (2) The sexual instinct is experienced
as a driving force beginning at birth and is elaborated sequentially in
its oral, anal and phallic components in the course of the first five
years of life; (3) Of the multitude of myths and stories that human
beings have created, the myth of Oedipus, for psychoanalysis, is the
single most important narrative organizing human psychological
development; and (4) The triangulated set of conflictual murderous
and incestuous fantasies constituting the Oedipus complex is “deter-
mined and laid down by heredity” (Freud, 1924, p. 174) – that is, it
is a manifestation of a universal, inborn propensity of human beings
to organize experience in this particular way (see Ogden, 1986).
The Oedipus complex for Freud (1924) is “contemporaneous”
(p. 174) with the phallic phase of sexual development. It is a web of
intrapsychic and interpersonal parent–child relationships in which
the boy, for example, takes his mother as the object of his romantic
and sexual desire, and wishes to take his father’s place with his mother
(Freud, 1910, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1925). The father is simultaneously
admired and viewed as a punitive rival. The aggressive instinct is
manifested, for the boy, in the form of the wish to kill his father in
order to have his mother for himself. The wish to kill the father is a
highly ambivalent one, given the boy’s pre-oedipal love for and
identification with his father, as well as the boy’s erotic attachment to
his father in the negative Oedipus complex (Freud, 1921). The boy
experiences guilt in response to his wish to murder his father (in the
positive Oedipus complex) and his mother (in the negative Oedipus
complex). Similarly, the girl takes her father as the object of her
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desire, and wishes to take her mother’s place with her father. She,
too, experiences guilt in response to her incestuous and murderous
wishes in the complete Oedipus complex (Freud, 1921, 1925).
The child guiltily fears punishment for his or her murderous and
incestuous wishes in the form of castration at the hands of the father.
Whether or not actual castration threats are made, the threat of
castration is present in the mind of the child as a “primal phantasy”
(Freud, 1916–17, p. 370), a universal unconscious fantasy that is part
of the make-up of the human psyche.
“Analytic observation[s] . . . justify the statement that the destruc-
tion of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castra-
tion” (Freud, 1924, p. 177). That is, the child, for fear of punishment
in the form of castration, relinquishes his or her sexual and aggressive
strivings in relation to the oedipal parents and replaces those “object
cathexes . . . [with] identifications” (ibid., p. 176) with parental
authority, prohibitions and ideals, which form the core of a new
psychic structure, the superego.
The tension between influence and originality
With Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex in mind, I will

now turn to Loewald’s reformulation. The opening sentence of
Loewald’s paper is a curious one in that it appears to make no
reference to the subject that the paper will address: “Many of the
views expressed in this paper have been stated previously by others”
(p. 384) (all page references not otherwise specified refer to Loewald’s
[1979] “The waning of the Oedipus complex”). Why would anyone
begin a psychoanalytic paper with a disclaimer renouncing claims for
originality? Loewald goes on immediately (still not giving the reader
a rationale for his odd approach) to cite a lengthy passage from
Breuer’s introduction to the theoretical section of Studies on Hysteria:
When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were

first expressed by single individuals quickly become common
property. Thus no one who attempts to put forward today his
views on hysteria and its psychical basis can avoid repeating a great
quantity of other people’s thoughts, which are in the act of passing
from personal into general possession. It is scarcely possible always
to be certain who first gave them utterance, and there is always a
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danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already

been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused
if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinc-
tion is made between what is my own and what originates
elsewhere. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be
found in the following pages (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895,
pp. 185–186; cited in Loewald, 1979, p. 384).
Subliminally, a sense of cyclical time is created by the juxtaposi-

tion of Loewald’s disclaiming originality and Breuer’s virtually iden-
tical statement made almost a century earlier. Loewald, before
discussing his ideas concerning the Oedipus complex, is showing
them to us in our experience of reading: no generation has the right
to claim absolute originality for its creations (see Ogden, 2003b,
2005b). And yet, each new generation does contribute something
uniquely its own: “Many [not all] of the views expressed in this paper
have been stated previously” (Loewald); and “Originality is claimed
for very little [but something]” (Breuer).1
Between the lines of Loewald’s text is the idea that it is the fate of
the child (as it was the fate of the parents) that what he makes of his
own will enter a process of “passing from personal into general
possession” (Breuer). In other words, what we do manage to
create that bears our own mark will become part of the pool of
collective knowledge and, in so doing, we become nameless, but not
insignificant ancestors to succeeding generations: “there is always a
danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been
said by someone else” (Breuer), an ancestor whose name has been
lost to us.
Loewald’s paper goes on to both explore and bring to life this
tension between one’s indebtedness to one’s forbears and one’s wish
to free oneself from them in the process of becoming a person on
one’s own terms. This tension between influence and originality lies
at the core of the Oedipus complex, as Loewald conceives of it.
1 Breuer’s words echo those written by Plato two-and-a-half millennia earlier: “Now I am
well aware that none of these ideas can have come from me – I know my own ignorance.
The only other possibility, I think, is that I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of
other people streaming in through my ears, though I’m so stupid that I’ve even forgotten
where and from whom I heard them” (Phaedrus, 1997, p. 514). Loewald, trained in
philosophy, no doubt was familiar with this dialogue.
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More than a repression
The paper seems to begin again in its second paragraph with a defini-
tion of the Oedipus complex as the “psychic representation of a
central, instinctually motivated, triangular conflictual constellation of
child–parent relations” (p. 384). (With its several beginnings and
several endings, the paper itself embodies the multiplicity of births
and deaths that mark the endless cycle of generations.) Loewald then
draws our attention to the way in which Freud (1923, 1925), in
speaking of the fate of the Oedipus complex, uses forceful language,
referring to its “destruction” (Freud, 1924, p. 177) and its “demoli-
tion” (Freud, 1925, p. 257). Moreover, Freud (1924) insists, “If the
ego has . . . not achieved much more than a repression of the complex,
the latter persists in an unconscious state . . . and will later manifest its
pathogenic effect” (p. 177). This idea provides Loewald the key to his
understanding of the fate of the Oedipus complex.
The reader’s head begins to swim at this point as a consequence
of the convergence of two interrelated enigmatic ideas: (1) the notion
that the Oedipus complex is “demolished” (how are we to under-
stand the idea that some of the most important human experiences
are, in health, destroyed?); and (2) the idea that the demolition of the
Oedipus complex is “more than a repression” (whatever that means).
The reader, here and throughout the paper, must do a good deal of
thinking for himself in making something of his own with the ideas
that Loewald is presenting. This, after all, is the task of each new
generation vis-à-vis the creations of its ancestors.
In an effort to find his bearings in this portion of the paper, the
reader must grapple with several questions. To begin with, the reader
must determine the meaning of the term repression as it is being used
here. Freud uses the term to refer to two overlapping but distinct
ideas in the course of his writing. At times, he uses the term to refer
to psychological operations that serve to establish “the unconscious
as a domain separate from the rest of the psyche” (Laplanche and
Pontalis, 1967, p. 390), a sine qua non of psychological health. At
other times – including, I believe, the instance under discussion – the
term is used to refer to a pathogenic expulsion from consciousness of
disturbing thoughts and feelings. Not only is the repressed segregated
from the main body of conscious thought, but repressed thoughts
and feelings are, for the most part, cut off from conscious and uncon-
scious psychological work.
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The reader must also attempt to formulate for himself what it

means to bring the Oedipus complex to a close not by repressing it,
but by demolishing the thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and
object-related experiences that constitute it. To my mind – and I
think that there would be general agreement among psychoanalysts
on this point – the psychic registration of a significant experience,
whether that registration be conscious or unconscious, is never
destroyed. It may be suppressed, repressed, displaced, denied,
disowned, dissociated, projected, introjected, split off, foreclosed and
so on, but never destroyed or demolished. No experience can ever
“unhappen” psychically. And yet this is what Freud and Loewald are
insisting to be the case – at least to a significant degree – in the
waning of the Oedipus complex. The unresolved question of what it
means to say that the Oedipus complex undergoes “more than a
repression” (i.e. that it is demolished) generates in the experience of
reading Loewald’s paper a tension that is not unlike the experience
of living with unresolved (but not repressed) oedipal conflict. It
unsettles everything it touches in a vitalizing way.
Parricide: A loving murder
Having introduced these thoughts and questions regarding the demo-

lition of the Oedipus complex, Loewald proceeds to broaden the
traditional conception of the oedipal murder. He uses the term parri-
cide to refer to the act committed by “One who murders a person to
whom he stands in a specially sacred relation, as a father, mother, or
other near relative, or (in a wider sense) a ruler. Sometimes, one
guilty of treason (Webster, International Dictionary, 2nd ed.)” (cited in
Loewald, 1979, p. 387).2 In the act of parricide, Loewald observes,
It is a parental authority that is murdered; by that, whatever is

sacred about the bond between child and parent is violated. If
we take etymology as a guide, it is bringing forth, nourishing,
2 Loewald uses the word sacred as a secular term to refer to that which is solemnly, respect-
fully set apart, as poetry, for Plato and Borges, is set apart from other forms of human
expressiveness – poetry is “something winged, light and sacred” (Plato, cited in Borges,
1984, p. 32).
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providing for, and protecting of the child by the parents that

constitute their parenthood, authority (authorship), and render
sacred the child’s ties with the parents. Parricide is a crime against
the sanctity of such a bond.
(p. 387)
Loewald again and again in his paper makes use of etymology – the
ancestry of words, the history of the way succeeding generations
both draw upon and alter the meanings of words.
Parricide involves a revolt against parental authority and parental
claims to authorship of the child. That revolt involves not a ceremo-
nious passing of the baton from one generation to the next, but a
murder in which a sacred bond is severed. The child’s breaking of the
sacred bond to the parents does not represent a fearful response to
the threat of bodily mutilation (castration), but a passionate assertion of
the “active urge for emancipation” (p. 389) from the parents. Loewald’s
phrase urge for emancipation connects the word urge (which has a strong
tie to the bodily instinctual drives) with the word emancipation, thus
generating the idea of an innate drive for individuation. In the language
itself, instinct theory is being broadened by Loewald to include drives
beyond the sexual and aggressive urges (see Chodorow, 2003; Kaywin,
1993; and Mitchell, 1998, for discussions of the relationship between
instinct theory and object relations theory in Loewald’s work).
In the oedipal battle, “opponents are required” (p. 389). A relative
absence of genuine parental authority leaves the child with little to
appropriate. Moreover, when the parents’ authority has not been
established, the child’s fantasies lack “brakes” (Winnicott, 1945,
p. 153) – that is, the secure knowledge that his fantasies will not be
allowed to be played out in reality. When parental authority does not
provide the “brakes” for fantasy, the fantasied murder of those one
loves and depends upon is too frightening to endure. Under such
pathological circumstances, the child, in an effort to defend himself
against the danger of the actual murder of the parents, represses
(buries alive) his murderous impulses and enforces that repression by
adopting a harshly punitive stance toward these feelings. In health,
paradoxically, the felt presence of parental authority makes it possible
for the child to safely murder his parents psychically (a fantasy that
need not be repressed). Oedipal parricide does not require repression
because it is ultimately a loving act, a “passionate appropriation of
what is experienced as loveable and admirable in parents” (p. 396). In
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a sense, the fantasied death of one’s oedipal parents is “collateral

damage” in the child’s struggle for independence and individuation.
Killing one’s parents is not an end in itself.
For Loewald, the Oedipus complex is at its core a face-off between
the generations, a life-and-death battle for autonomy, authority and
responsibility. In this struggle, parents are “actively rejected, fought
against, and destroyed, to varying degrees” (pp. 388–389). Difficulty
arises not from parricidal fantasies per se, but from an inability to
safely commit parricide, to sever one’s oedipal ties to one’s parents.
The following brief clinical account illustrates a form of difficulty
encountered in the oedipal appropriation of parental authority:
Several years into his analysis, Mr. N told me the following dream:
“I was checking in at the front desk of a hotel late at night. The
man behind the desk told me that all the rooms were booked. I
said that I had heard that hotels keep a few rooms open in case
someone shows up in the middle of the night. I thought, but did
not say to him, that those rooms are meant for important people.
I knew that I was not an important person. At the other end of
the long desk, an older woman who was checking in said in a
commanding voice, ‘He’s with me – he’ll share my room.’ I didn’t
want to share a room with her. The thought was repellent. I felt as
if I couldn’t get a breath of air and tried to find a way out of the
hotel, but I couldn’t find an exit.”
Mr. N said that he felt extremely embarrassed by the dream and
had considered not mentioning it to me. He told me that even
though we had often talked about his feeling that his parents had
had no psychological room in themselves for him as a child, he
was horrified in the dream by the woman (who seemed like his
mother) offering to have him share her room, and, by implication,
her bed, with him.
I said to Mr. N that the embarrassment he felt in response to the
dream may stem not only from his feeling horrified by the idea of
sleeping with his mother, but also from seeing himself as a peren-
nial child who lacks the authority to claim a place of his own
among adults – a boy who will never become a man.
By contrast, an experience in the analysis of a man in his mid-

twenties captures something of the experience of a healthy oedipal
succession of generations:
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A medical student near the end of his analysis with me began affec-
tionately to refer to me as “a geezer” after it had become apparent
that I knew very little of the developments in psychopharmacology
that had occurred in the previous 25 years. I was reminded of my
own first analysis, which had begun while I was a medical student.
My analyst occasionally referred to himself as an “old buck” in
response to my competitiveness with him regarding what I was
learning about current developments in psychoanalysis. I remem-
bered having been surprised by his seemingly calm acceptance of
his place in the “over-the-hill” generation of analysts and of my
place in the new (and, I believed, far more dynamic) generation.
While with my medical student analysand, my memory of my
analyst’s referring to himself as an old buck struck me as both
comic and disturbing – disturbing in that at the time he said it, he
was younger than I was at that juncture in the analysis of my
patient. I recognized how his acceptance of his place in the succes-
sion of generations was currently of great value to me in my efforts
not only to accept, but also, in a certain way, to embrace my place
as “a geezer” in the analysis of my medical student.
As parents to our children, even as we fight to maintain our

parental authority, we allow ourselves to be killed by our children
lest we “diminish them” (p. 395). In the Oedipus myth, Laius and
Jocasta are told by the oracle at Delphi that their son is destined to
murder his father. The horror of this prophecy is equivalent in
present-day terms to a hospital forewarning each couple as they enter
the obstetrics ward that their child who is about to be born will one
day murder them. Laius and Jocasta attempt to circumvent such an
outcome by killing their child. But they cannot bring themselves to
commit the murder by their own hand. They give Oedipus to a
shepherd who is told to leave the infant in the forest to die. In so
doing, Laius and Jocasta unconsciously collude in their own murder.
They create a window of opportunity for their child not only to
survive, but also to grow up to murder them.3
The dilemma faced by Laius and Jocasta is a dilemma shared not
only by all parents, but also by all analysts when we begin analysis
3 The Oedipus complex is, in a sense, a process by which the child, in killing his parents
(with their cooperation), creates his own ancestors (see Borges, 1962).
146
with a new patient. In beginning analysis, we as analysts are setting in

motion a process in which the patient – if all goes well – will
contribute to our dying. For all to go well, we must allow ourselves
to be killed by our patients lest “we diminish them” (p. 395), for
example, by treating them as less mature than they are, by giving
advice that is not needed, supportive tones of voice that are unwanted,
and interpretations that are undermining of the patient’s ability to
think reflectively and insightfully for himself. Not to diminish one’s
children (and one’s patients) involves not a passive resignation to
aging and death, but an actively loving gesture repeated time and
again in which one gives over one’s place in the present generation
to take one’s place sadly and proudly among those in the process
of becoming ancestors. Resistance to taking one’s place as part of
the past generation will not stop the succession of generations,
but it will leave a felt absence in the lives of one’s children and
grandchildren, an absence where their ancestors might under other
circumstances have been a highly valued presence. (Loewald told
his colleague, Bryce Boyer, that he could not have written this
paper before he became a grandfather [Boyer, 1999, personal
communication].)
Parents may try to protect themselves against giving way to the
next generation by behaving as if there is no difference between the
generations. For example, when parents do not close bedroom and
bathroom doors, or display erotic photographs as “art,” or do not
wear clothing at home because “the human body is not a shameful
thing,” they are implicitly claiming that there is no generational
difference – children and adults are equal. Children, under such
circumstances, have no genuine parental objects to kill and only a
perverse version of parental authority to appropriate. This leaves the
individual a stunted child frozen in time.
Having discussed the central role in the Oedipus complex of
the child’s loving murder of his parents, Loewald makes a
remarkable statement that sets this paper apart from its psychoanalytic
predecessors:
If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of

our parents, by genuine emancipation we do kill something vital
in them – not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contrib-
uting to their dying.
(p. 395)
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In the space of a single sentence, the Oedipus complex is radically

reconceived. It had been well established by Freud (1909, 1910) that
the Oedipus complex is not simply an intrapsychic event, but a set of
living object relationships between the child and his parents. But
Loewald does not stop there. For him, the fantasied murder of the
parents that is played out in oedipal object relationships contributes
to – is part of the process of – the parents’ dying. It is tempting to
water down Loewald’s “blunt language” by saying that “their dying”
is a metaphor for parents’ relinquishing their authority over (their
authorship of) the life of the child. But Loewald is saying more than
that: he is insisting that the living out of the Oedipus complex by
children and their parents is part of the emotional process (which is
inseparable from bodily processes) by which human beings grow up,
grow old, and die.
The battle between parents and children for autonomy and
authority is most evident in adolescence and beyond, but it is, of
course, equally important in early childhood. This is true not only of
the child’s falling in love with one parent while becoming intensely
jealous of, and rivalrous with, the other. In addition, for example, the
“terrible twos” often involves the parents in a battle with their newly
ambulatory child who is relentlessly insistent on his independence.
Parents of two-year-olds frequently experience their child’s “stub-
born willfulness” as a betrayal of an unspoken agreement that the
child will remain a fully dependent, adored and adoring baby
“forever.” The child’s breaking of the “agreement” constitutes an
assault on the parents’ wish to remain parents of a baby timelessly, i.e.
insulated from the passage of time, aging, death and the succession of
generations. (The relationship of the “stubborn” toddler to his
parents is triangulated to the degree that the child splits the parents
intrapsychically into the good and the bad parent or parents.)
The metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents
Thus, parricide, from the point of view of both parents and children,
is a necessary path to the child’s growing up, his coming to life as an
adult who has attained authority in his own right. Oedipal parricide
conceived of in this way underlies, for both Freud and Loewald, the
organization of “the superego [which is] the culmination of indi-
vidual psychic structure formation” (Loewald, 1979, p. 404). The
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use of the term superego in this phrase and throughout Loewald’s

paper represents a residue of the structural model of the mind that
Loewald is in the process of transforming. Consequently, the term, as
used by Loewald, is confusing. As I read his paper, I find it clarifying
to my thinking to “translate” the term superego into terms that are
more in keeping with the ideas that Loewald is developing. In place
of the word superego, I use the idea of an aspect of the self (derived
from appropriated parental authority) that takes the measure of and
the responsibility for who one is and how one conducts oneself.
Superego formation involves an “internalization” (Loewald,
p. 390) of or “identification” (Loewald, p. 391) with the oedipal
parents. (Freud [1921, 1923, 1924, 1925], too, repeatedly uses the
terms identification, introjection, and incorporation to describe the process
of superego formation.) This brings us to what I consider to be one
of the most difficult and most important questions raised by Loewald
regarding the Oedipus complex: what does it mean to say that oedipal
object relationships are internalized in the process of superego organ-
ization? Loewald responds to this question in a very dense passage
that leaves a great deal unsaid or merely suggested. I will offer a close
reading of this passage in which I include inferences that I have drawn
from Loewald’s statements:
The organization of the superego, as internalization . . . of oedipal

object relations, documents parricide and at the same time is its
atonement and metamorphosis: atonement insofar as the superego
makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal relationships; metamor-
phosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object relations are
transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations.
(p. 389)
To paraphrase the opening portion of this passage, the organization

of the superego “documents” parricide in the sense that superego
organization is living proof of the murder of the parents. The
superego embodies the child’s successful appropriation of parental
authority which is transformed into the child’s capacities for autonomy
and responsibility. The superego as psychic structure monitors the
ego and, in this sense, takes responsibility for the ego/das Ich/the I.
That same process of superego organization constitutes not only an
internal record of parricide in the form of an alteration of the psyche of
the child, but also an “atonement” (p. 389) for the murder of the
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parents. As I understand it, the organization of the superego represents

an atonement for parricide in that, at the same moment that the child
murders the parents (psychically), he bestows upon them a form of
immortality. That is, by incorporating the child’s experience of his
parents (albeit, a “transmuted” version of them) into the very structure
of who he is as an individual, the child secures the parents a place, a seat
of influence, not only in the way the child conducts his life, but also in
the way the child’s children conduct their lives, and on and on. I am
using the word children here both literally and metaphorically. The
alteration of the psyche involved in superego organization influences
not simply the way the grown child relates to his own children; it
affects everything that the child creates in the course of his life, for
example, the qualities of the friendships and other love relationships in
which he takes part, as well as the thinking and creativity that he brings
to the work that he does. These creations (his literal and metaphorical
children) alter those they touch, who in turn, alter those they touch.
The “internalization” of the parents (in a transformed state) consti-
tutes atonement for killing the parents in that this internalization
contributes to the child’s becoming like the parents. But, in another
sense, it is in the “transmutation” of the parents that an even more
profound form of atonement lies. To the extent that the parents have
been transformed in the internalization process, the parents have
contributed to the creation of a child who is capable of being and
becoming unlike them – that is, capable of becoming a person who is,
in certain respects, more than the people who the parents have been
capable of being and becoming. What more meaningful atonement
can there be for killing one’s parents?
Loewald continues in the passage under discussion: superego
organization is an atonement for parricide “insofar as the superego
makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal object relations.” These
words are carefully chosen. The word restitution derives from the
Latin word meaning to re-establish. The formation of the superego
restores to the parents their authority as parents – but not the same
authority that they formerly held as parents. Now they are parents to
a child who is increasingly capable of being responsible for himself
and to himself as an autonomous person. The parents who are “resti-
tuted” (re-established) are parents who had not previously existed
(or, perhaps more accurately, had existed only as a potential).
For Loewald, in the passage under discussion, superego formation
as a part of the resolution of the Oedipus complex represents not
150
only an atonement for parricide and the restitution of the parents, but
also a “metamorphosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object
relations are transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural rela-
tions” (p. 389). I find the metaphor of metamorphosis to be critical
to Loewald’s conception of what it means to say that the parents are
internalized in a “transmuted” form. (Loewald, in this paper, uses the
word metamorphosis only in the sentence being cited and may not
have been aware of the full implications of his use of this metaphor.)
In complete metamorphosis, for example, in the life cycle of the
butterfly, inside the cocoon, the tissues of the caterpillar (the larva)
break down. A few clusters of cells from the breakdown of the larval
tissues constitute the beginning of a new cellular organization from
which adult structures are generated (e.g. wings, eyes, tongue,
antennae and body segments).
There is continuity (the DNA of the caterpillar and that of the
butterfly are identical) and discontinuity (there is a vast difference
between the morphology and physiology of the external and internal
structures of the caterpillar and that of the butterfly). So, too, superego
formation (the internalization of oedipal object relations) involves a
simultaneity of continuity and radical transformation. The parents (as
experienced by the child) are not internalized, any more than a cater-
pillar sprouts wings. The child’s “internalization” of oedipal object
relationships involves a profound transformation of his experience
of his parents (analogous to the breakdown of the bodily structure
of the caterpillar) before they are restituted in the form of the
organization of the child’s more mature psychic structure (superego
formation).4
In other words, the child’s “internalized” oedipal object relationships
(constituting the superego) have their origins in the “DNA” of the
parents – that is, the unconscious psychological make-up of the parents
(which in turn “documents” their own oedipal object relationships
4 A passage from Karp and Berrill’s (1981) classic, Development, underscores the aptness of
the metaphor of metamorphosis: “The completion of the cocoon signals the beginning of
a new and even more remarkable sequence of events. On the third day after a cocoon is
finished, a great wave of death and destruction sweeps over the internal organs of the
caterpillar. The specialized larval tissues break down, but meanwhile, certain more or less
discrete clusters of cells, tucked away here and there in the body, begin to grow rapidly,
nourishing themselves on the breakdown products of the dead and dying larval tissues.
These are the imaginal discs . . . Their spurt of growth now shapes the organism according
to a new plan. New organs arise from the discs” (p. 692).
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with their parents). At the same time, despite this powerful transgen-
erational continuity of oedipal experience, if the child (with the parents’
help) is able to kill his oedipal parents, he creates a psychological clear-
ance in which to enter into libidinal relationships with “novel” (p. 390)
(non-incestuous) objects. These novel relationships have a life of their
own outside of the terms of the child’s libidinal and aggressive relation-
ships with his oedipal parents. In this way, genuinely novel (non-
incestuous) relationships with one’s parents and others become possible.
(The novel object relationships are colored, but not dominated, by
transferences to the oedipal parents.)
In a single summary sentence, which could have been written by
no one other than Loewald, the elements of the transformations
involved in superego formation (the establishment of an autono-
mous, responsible self) are brought together: “The self, in its
autonomy, is an atonement structure, a structure of reconciliation,
and as such a supreme achievement” (p. 394).
The transitional incestuous object relationship
The paper begins anew as Loewald takes up the incestuous compo-

nent of the Oedipus complex. This portion of the paper, for me,
lacks the power of the foregoing discussion of imagined (and real)
parricide, guilt, atonement, and restitution. It seems to me that the
centerpiece of the paper – and Loewald’s principal interest – is the
role of the Oedipus complex in the child’s achievement of an auton-
omous, responsible self. Incestuous desire is a subsidiary theme in
that story.
Loewald opens his discussion of oedipal incestuous wishes by
raising the rarely asked (even a bit startling) question: What’s wrong
with incest? He responds, “Incestuous object relations are evil,
according to received morality, in that they interfere with or destroy
that sacred bond . . . the original oneness, most obvious in the
mother–infant dual unity” (p. 396). Incest involves the intrusion of
differentiated libidinal object relatedness into the “ ‘sacred’ inno-
cence of primary narcissistic unity . . . [which is] anterior to indi-
viduation and its inherent guilt and atonement” (p. 396).
In other words, we view incest as evil because, in incest, differen-
tiated, object-related sexual desire is directed toward the very same
person (and the very same body) with whom an undifferentiated
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bond (which we hold sacred) existed and continues to exist. Thus,

for Loewald, incest is felt to be wrong, not primarily because it repre-
sents a challenge to the father’s authority and a claim to the mother,
or because it denies the difference between the generations, but
because it destroys the demarcation between a fused form of mother–
child relatedness (primary identification) and a differentiated object
relatedness with the same person. Incest is felt to be evil because it
overturns the “barrier between [primary] identification [at-one-
ment] and [differentiated] object cathexis” (p. 397).
The overturning of the barrier between primary identification and
object cathexis is a matter of the greatest importance, not only
because the individual’s emerging sexuality is shaped by the way the
parents and children handle incestuous desire, but, perhaps even
more importantly, because the individual’s capacity for healthy object
relatedness of every sort – his capacity to establish a generative
dialectic of separateness from, and union with, other people – depends
upon the living integrity of that barrier.
Parricide is a manifestation of the oedipal child’s drive to become
an autonomous individual; incestuous wishes and fantasies represent
the concurrent need on the part of the oedipal child for unity with
the mother. From this vantage point, “The incestuous [oedipal]
object thus is an intermediate, ambiguous entity, neither a full-
fledged libidinal objectum [differentiated object] nor an unequivocal
identificatum [undifferentiated object]” (p. 397). Loewald uses the
terms incestuous object and incestuous object relationship to refer not to
actual incest, but to external and internal object relationships in
which incestuous fantasies predominate. The incestuous oedipal rela-
tionship persists as an ongoing aspect of the Oedipus complex, which
mediates the tension between the urge for autonomy and responsi-
bility and the healthy pull toward unity (for example, as an aspect of
falling in love, empathy, sexuality, caregiving, “primary maternal
preoccupation” [Winnicott, 1956, p. 300], and so on).
Both the superego and the transitional incestuous object relation-
ship are heirs to the Oedipus complex in complementary ways, each
mediating a tension between love of the parents and the wish to
emancipate oneself from them and to establish novel object relation-
ships. There are, however, important differences between the two.
The atonement (at-one-ment) that underlies superego formation
involves the metamorphic internalization of an object relationship
with the parents as whole and separate objects; by contrast, the
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at-one-ment involved in (transitional) incestuous object relatedness

is that of fusion with the parents (primary identification).
By understanding the oedipal incestuous object relationship as
constituting an intermediate position between undifferentiated and
differentiated object relatedness, Loewald is not simply amplifying a
psychoanalytic conception of pre-oedipal development. He is
suggesting something more. The Oedipus complex is not only a set
of differentiated object relationships that comprise “the neurotic
core” (p. 400) of the personality. The Oedipus complex “contains
. . . in its very core” (p. 399) a more archaic set of object relationships
that constitutes the “psychotic core” (p. 400) of the personality.
From the latter, the earliest forms of healthy separation-individuation
emerge.
Thus, the Oedipus complex is the emotional crucible in which the
entirety of the personality is forged as the oedipal configuration is
reworked and reorganized on increasingly more mature planes
throughout the individual’s life (see Ogden, 1987). Loewald, not one
to claim originality for his ideas, states that while Freud “acknowl-
edged the fact [that the Oedipus complex centrally involves undif-
ferentiated object relations] long ago” (Loewald, 1979, p. 399), this
aspect of the Oedipus complex is “more [important] than was real-
ized by Freud” (p. 399). This more primitive aspect of the Oedipus
complex is not outgrown; rather, it takes its place as “a deep layer of
advanced mentality” (p. 402).
Before concluding this part of the discussion, I will revisit an idea
that remains unresolved. At the outset of the paper, Loewald (with
Freud) insisted that in health the Oedipus complex is “demolished.”
Loewald, in the course of the paper, modifies that idea:
In the abstract, as the organization of this structure [the autono-

mous self] proceeds, the Oedipus complex would be destroyed as
a constellation of object relations or their fantasy representations.
But, in the words of Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest, nothing fades,
“but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”
(p. 394)
In other words, the Oedipus complex is not destroyed, but is contin-

ually in the process of being transformed into “something rich and
strange,” that is, into a multitude of evolving, forever problematic
aspects of the human condition which constitute “the troubling but
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rewarding richness of life” (p. 400). The reader may wonder why
Loewald does not say so from the beginning instead of invoking the
clearly untenable idea that experience can be destroyed. I believe that
Loewald begins with more absolute and dramatic language because
there is a truth to it that he does not want the reader to lose sight of:
to the degree that one succeeds in murdering one’s parents psychi-
cally and atones for that parricide in a way that contributes to the
formation of an autonomous self, one is released from the emotional
confines of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is destroyed
to the extent that oedipal relationships with one’s parents no longer
constitute the conscious and unconscious emotional world within
which the individual lives as a perennial, dependent child.
The paper closes as it began, with a comment addressing writing
itself as opposed to the subject matter that has been taken up:
I am aware that, perhaps confusingly, I have shifted perspectives

several times in my presentation. I hope that the composite picture
I have tried to sketch in this fashion has not become too blurred
by my approach.
(p. 404)
The words, shift[ing] perspectives, to my ear, describe a style of

writing and thinking that is always in the process of being revised,
and a style of reading that is as critically questioning as it is receptive
to the ideas being presented. What more suitable ending can one
imagine for a paper that addresses the ways in which one generation
leaves its mark on the next, and yet fosters in its descendants the
exercise of their right and responsibility to become authors of their
own ideas and ways of conducting themselves?
Loewald and Freud
I will conclude by highlighting some of the differences between

Loewald’s and Freud’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex. For
Loewald, the Oedipus complex is driven not primarily by the child’s
sexual and aggressive impulses (as it is for Freud), but by the “urge for
emancipation,” the need to become an autonomous individual. The
girl, for example, is not most fundamentally driven to take the place
of her mother in the parents’ bed, but to take her parents’ authority as
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her own. The child atones for imagined (and real) parricide by means
of a metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents which results
in an alteration of the self (the formation of a new psychic agency, the
superego). “Responsibility to oneself . . . is the essence of superego as
internal agency” (Loewald, 1979, p. 392). Thus, the child repays the
parents in the most meaningful terms possible – that is, by establishing
a sense of self that is responsible to oneself and for oneself, a self that
may be capable of becoming a person who is, in ways, more than the
people who the parents were capable of being and becoming.
The incestuous component of the Oedipus complex contributes
to the maturation of the self by serving as an ambiguous, transitional
form of object relatedness that holds in tension with one another
differentiated and undifferentiated dimensions of mature object ties.
The Oedipus complex is brought to an end not by a fear-driven
response to the threat of castration, but by the child’s need to atone
for parricide and to restore to the parents their (now transformed)
authority as parents.
I do not view Loewald’s version of the Oedipus complex as an
updated version of Freud’s. Rather, to my mind, the two renderings
of the Oedipus complex constitute different perspectives from which
to view the same phenomena. Both perspectives are indispensable
to a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of the Oedipus
complex.
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9
Harold Searles’ “Oedipal love
in the countertransference” and
“Unconscious identification”
No other analytic writer, to my mind, rivals Searles in his ability to

capture in words his observations concerning his emotional response
to what is occurring in the analytic relationship and his use of
these observations in his effort to understand and interpret the
transference–countertransference. I offer here close readings of
portions of two of Searles’ papers, “Oedipal love in the countertrans-
ference” (1959) and “Unconscious identification” (1990), in which I
describe not only what Searles thinks, but what I believe to be the
essence of the way Searles thinks and how he works in the analytic
setting. Being receptive to what is occurring at a given moment in an
analysis involves, for Searles, an exquisite sensitivity to the uncon-
scious communications of the patient. Such receptivity to the patient’s
unconscious communications requires of the analyst a form of laying
bare his own unconscious experience. Searles’ way of using himself
analytically very often entails a blurring of the distinction between
his own conscious and unconscious experience as well as the distinc-
tion between his unconscious experience and that of the patient. As
a result, Searles’ comments to the patient (and to the reader)
concerning what he understands to be occurring between himself
and the patient are often startling to the reader, but almost always
utilizable by the patient (and the reader) for purposes of conscious
and unconscious psychological work.
In discussing “Oedipal love in the countertransference,” I focus
on the way in which, for Searles, unflinchingly accurate clinical
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observation spawns original clinical theory (in this instance, a recon-

ceptualization of the Oedipus complex). When I speak of clinical theory,
I am referring to proposed experience-near understandings (formu-
lated in terms of thoughts, feelings and behaviour) of phenomena
occurring in the clinical setting. Transference, for example, is a clinical
theory that proposes that certain of the patient’s feelings towards the
analyst, unbeknownst to the patient, have their origins in feelings that
the patient experienced in previous real and imagined object relation-
ships, usually childhood relationships. By contrast, psychoanalytic
theories involving higher levels of abstraction (for example, Freud’s
topographic model, Klein’s concept of the internal object world, and
Bion’s theory of alpha function) propose spatial and other types of
metaphor as ways of thinking about how the mind works.
In my reading of “Unconscious identification,” I suggest that
Searles has a distinctive way of thinking and working analytically
which might be thought of as a process of “turning experience inside
out.” By this I mean that Searles transforms what had been an invis-
ible and yet felt presence, an emotional context, into psychological
content about which the patient may be able to think and speak.
What had been a frightening, unnamed, fully taken for granted
quality of the patient’s internal and external world is transformed by
Searles into a verbally symbolized emotional dilemma about which
the analytic pair may be able to think and converse.
Finally, I discuss what I view as the complementarity between
Searles’ work and that of Bion. I have found that reading Searles
provides a vibrant clinical context for Bion’s work, and reading Bion
provides a valuable theoretical context for Searles’ work. I focus, in
particular, on the mutually enriching “conversation” (created in the
mind of the reader) between Searles’ clinical work and Bion’s
concepts of the container–contained, the fundamental human need
for truth and Bion’s reconceptualization of the relationship between
conscious and unconscious experience.
Oedipal love in the countertransference
In the opening pages of the “Oedipal love” paper, Searles provides a

thoughtful review of the analytic literature concerning countertrans-
ference love. The consensus on this topic current at the time was
succinctly articulated by Tower (1956, cited in Searles, 1959, p. 285):
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Searles on oedipal love and Ucs identification
“Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference . . .

states unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to
be tolerated . . .” With this sentiment looming in the background,
Searles presents an analytic experience that occurred in the latter part
of a four-year analysis (which he conducted early in his career). He
tells us that the patient’s femininity had initially been “considerably
repressed” (1959, p. 290). In the last year of this analysis, Searles
found himself having “abundant desires to be married to her, and
fantasies of being her husband” (1959, p. 290). Blunt acknowledge-
ment of such thoughts and feelings was unprecedented in 1959, and,
even today, is a rare occurrence in the analytic literature. The word
marry – such an ordinary word – is strangely powerful as a conse-
quence of its connotations both of falling in love and of wishes to
make a family and to live everyday life with the person one loves. It
seems to me highly significant that the fantasies described by Searles
never include imagining sexual intercourse (or any other explicit
sexual activity) with the patient. I believe that this quality of Searles’
fantasies reflects the nature of the conscious and unconscious fantasy
life of the oedipal child. Although drawing this parallel between the
analytic experience and the childhood experience is left largely to the
reader, it seems to me that Searles is suggesting that for the oedipal
boy, the idea of “marrying” his mother and being her “husband” are
mysterious, ill-defined and exciting ideas. To “marry” one’s mother/
patient is not so much a matter of having her as a sexual partner as it
is a matter of having her all to oneself for one’s entire life, having her
as one’s best friend and one’s very beautiful, sexually exciting “wife”
whom one deeply loves and feels deeply loved by. Searles’ writing
does not make it clear to what degree these feelings and fantasies are
conscious to Searles (or, by extension, to the oedipal child); that
unclarity is, I believe, fully intended and reflects an aspect of the
quality of Searles’ (and perhaps the oedipal child’s) emotional state
while in the grips of oedipal love.
In this first clinical example, Searles describes feeling anxious,
guilty and embarrassed by his love for his patient. In response to the
patient saying that she felt sad about the imminent termination of the
analysis, Searles said to her that he
felt . . . much as did Mrs. Gilbreth, of Cheaper by the Dozen fame,

[who] . . . said to her husband, when the youngest of their twelve
children was now passing out of the phase of early infancy, “It
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surely will be strange not to be waking up, for the first time in
sixteen years, for the two-o’clock feeding!”
(p. 290)
The patient looked “startled and murmured something about

thinking that she had become older than that” (p. 290). Searles, in
retrospect, came to understand that his focus on the patient’s infantile
needs represented an anxious retreat from his feelings of love for her
as “an adult woman who could never be mine” (p. 290). Searles’ fear
of acknowledging to himself and (indirectly) to the patient his oedipal
love (as opposed to the love of a parent for his or her infant) stemmed
primarily from his fear that openly acknowledging such feelings
would elicit attacks from his external and internal analytic elders:
My training had been predominantly such as to make me hold

rather suspect any strong feelings on the part of the analyst towards
his patient, and these particular emotions [romantic and erotic
wishes to marry the patient] seemed to be of an especially illegiti-
mate nature.
(p. 285)
Searles, even in this only partially successful management of oedipal

love in the analytic setting, is implicitly raising an important question
regarding his own experience of oedipal love for the patient. What is
countertransference love as opposed to “non-countertransference”
love? Is the former less real than the latter? If so, in what way? These
questions are left unresolved for the time being.
Searles, over the course of time, experienced oedipal love in the
transference–countertransference as a consistent part of his analytic
work. He says:
I have grown successively less troubled at finding such responses in

myself, less constrained to conceal these from the patient, and
increasingly convinced that they augur well rather than ill for the
outcome of our relationship, and that the patient’s self-esteem
benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of
arousing such responses in his analyst. I have come to believe that
there is a direct correlation between, on the one hand, the affective
intensity with which the analyst experiences an awareness of such
feelings – and of the unrealizability of such feelings – in himself
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towards the patient, and, on the other hand, the depth of matura-
tion which the patient achieves in the analysis.
(p. 291)
This passage illustrates the power of understatement in Searles’

work. He leaves unspoken the central idea of the paper: in order to
successfully analyze the Oedipus complex, the analyst must fall in love with
the patient while recognizing that his wishes will never be realized. And, by
extension, a successful oedipal experience in childhood requires
that the oedipal parent fall deeply in love with the oedipal child
while remaining fully aware that this love will never leave the
domain of feelings. (In passages such as the one just cited, Searles
seamlessly generates clinical theory from clinical description of the
transference–countertransference.)
Searles’ presentation of this first clinical example suggests an essen-
tial paradox underlying healthy oedipal love: both in childhood and
in the transference–countertransference, the wished-for marriage is
treated simultaneously as a real and as an imaginary marriage. There
is at once the belief that the marriage is possible, and yet, at the same
time, the knowledge (secured by the parents’/analyst’s groundedness
in their roles as parents/analyst) that the marriage is never to be. In
the spirit of Winnicott’s (1951) conception of transitional object
relatedness, the question, “Does the analyst really want to marry his
patient?” is never raised. The oedipal love of the patient and the
analyst involves a state of mind suspended between reality and fantasy
(see Gabbard, 1996, for a thoughtful examination and elaboration of
this conception of transference–countertransference love).
The clinical examples that Searles provides in the remainder of his
paper are all taken from work with chronic schizophrenic patients.
Searles believes, on the basis of his extensive psychotherapeutic work
at Chestnut Lodge, that the analysis of schizophrenic patients (and
other patients suffering from psychological illnesses that have their
origins in very early life) affords a particularly fruitful way of learning
about the nature of experience that is common to all humankind.
Searles also believes that successful analytic work with such patients
leads to an analytic relationship in which the most mature aspects of
development (including the resolution of the Oedipus complex) are
not only experienced and verbalized, but have a clarity and intensity,
both in the transference and the countertransference, that is rare in
work with healthier patients.
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In discussing the analysis of a schizophrenic woman, Searles

acknowledges that it was disconcerting to him, late in that analysis,
to find himself feeling strong wishes to marry a woman “whom one’s
fellows might perceive as being . . . grossly ill and anything but attrac-
tive” (p. 292). But Searles’ capacity to see his patient as a beautiful,
highly desirable woman is precisely what was required of him. Searles
found that straightforwardly facing his romantic feelings for this
schizophrenic patient (while remaining clear in his own mind that he
was the therapist) contributed to
the resolution of what had become a stereotyped situation of the

patient’s being absorbed in making incestuous appeals to, or
demands upon, the therapist, in a fashion which had been throt-
tling the mutual investigation of the patient’s difficulties . . .
[W]hen . . . a therapist dare not even recognize such responses in
himself – let alone expressing them to the patient – the situation
tends all the more to remain stalemated at this level.
(pp. 292–293)
Searles is suggesting here that the therapist “candidly” (p. 292)

allowing the patient to see that he or she stirs in him wishes to marry
the patient does not have the effect of exacerbating the patient’s
unrelenting “incestuous appeals”; rather, the therapist’s acknowl-
edgement of “romantic love for the patient” contributes to the
“resolution” of the stalemate (the repetitive, unrelenting incestuous
appeals) and the “freeing-up” (p. 292) of the patient’s and the thera-
pist’s capacities for analytic work. Though Searles does not discuss
the theoretical underpinnings of his findings, it seems that the thera-
peutic effect of the expression of the therapist’s love for the patient is
not being conceptualized as a corrective emotional experience, but as
the meeting of a developmental need for recognition of who the
patient is (as opposed to the satisfying of an erotic desire). The latter
would lead to increased sexual excitement; the former fosters psycho-
logical maturation, including the consolidation of a self that is expe-
rienced as both loved and loving. Searles is implicitly, and only
implicitly, positing a human developmental need to love and be
loved and to be recognized as a separate person whose love is valued.
Searles deepens his investigation into the role of the analyst’s feel-
ings of oedipal love for the patient by discussing a complex emotional
situation that came to a head about 18 months into the analysis of a
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“sensitive, highly intelligent, physically handsome” (p. 294) paranoid

schizophrenic man. Searles began to feel uneasy about the intensity
of his feelings for this patient. He says he became alarmed during a
session
while we were sitting in silence and a radio not far away was
playing a tenderly romantic song, when I realized that this man
was dearer to me than anyone else in the world, including my
wife. Within a few months I succeeded in finding ‘reality’ reasons
why I would not be able to continue indefinitely with his therapy,
and he moved to a distant part of the country.
(p. 294)
Searles hypothesizes that he had been able to tolerate the patient’s

sarcasm and scorn which replicated in the transference the patient’s
experience of feeling hated by his mother and, in return, feeling
hateful toward her. What Searles had been unable “to brave” (p. 295)
was the love in the transference–countertransference which had its
origins in the love that had “prevailed [between the patient and his
mother] behind a screen of mutual rejection” (p. 295). In particular,
it was his romantic love for a man that frightened Searles so
profoundly, at that early point in his career, that he was unable to
continue working with this patient.
Searles’ description of sitting with this patient while a radio was
playing a tender love song never fails to stir me deeply. Searles does
not simply tell the reader what occurred; he shows the reader what
happened in the experience of reading: the tenderness of the music is
created in the sound of the words. In the sentence describing this
experience (cited above), the words “while we were” (three mono-
syllabic words repeating the soft “w” sound) are followed by “sitting
in silence” (a pairing of two-syllable words beginning with a soft,
sensuous “s” sound). The sentence continues to echo the soft “w’s”
of “while we were” in the words “away,” “was,” and “when,” and
ends with three tagged-on words which explode like a hand grenade:
“including my wife.” (At the core of the denouement is the word
“wife,” which, with its own soft “w,” conveys the feeling that this is
the word that has been adumbrated all along, the word that has lain
in wait in all that has preceded. The easy movement of sound creates
in the experience of reading the tranquility of the love that Searles
and the patient felt for one another, while the tagged-on thought,
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“including my wife,” powerfully cuts through the dreamy quietude

of the scene.
In this way, Searles creates in the experience of reading something
of his experience of sudden, unexpected alarm at the juncture of the
analysis being presented. The reader, too, is unprepared for this
development and wonders if Searles could really mean what he says:
that the patient felt more dear to him than his wife. The compactness
of the phrase “including my wife” contributes to the unequivocal
nature of the answer to this question: yes, he does mean it. And that
fact so frightened Searles that he precipitated the premature end of
the therapy. I believe that alarming surprises to the reader such as the
one just described account for a good deal of the intense anger Searles
was notorious for eliciting from audiences to whom he presented his
work. Searles refuses to round the edges of an experience. Reading
his work is not an experience of arriving at an understanding; it is an
experience of being rudely woken up to disconcerting truths about
one’s experience with one’s patients. Successive experiences of
“waking up” to oneself, on the part of both patient and analyst, for
Searles, are pivotal aspects of the analytic experience. It is when the
therapist is not able to wake up to what is occurring that acting in
and acting out (on the part of both the patient and analyst) tend to
occur. Here, too, these bits of clinical theory are implicit in Searles’
descriptions of his clinical work.
In another analytic experience involving oedipal love for a man
(which occurred some years after the clinical experience just
described), Searles speaks of feeling a mixture of tender love and
murderous hatred toward a severely ill paranoid schizophrenic man:
He referred to us, now in the third and fourth years of analysis, as

being married . . . When I took him for a ride in my car for one
of the sessions, I was amazed at the wholly delightful fantasy and
feeling I had, namely that we were lovers on the threshold of
marriage, with a whole world of wonders opening up before us; I
had visions of going . . . to look for furniture together.
(p. 295)
The final detail of “going . . . to look for furniture together” poig-

nantly conveys the excitement not of sexual arousal, but of dreaming
and planning a life to be lived with the person one loves. In oedipal
love, these dreams on the part of both child and parent, patient and
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analyst, cannot be lived out with the current object of one’s love: “I
was filled with a poignant realization of how utterly and tragically
unrealizable were the desires of this man who had been hospitalized
continually, now, for fourteen years” (p. 296). In this second example
of oedipal love for a man, Searles is saddened, not frightened, by his
love for the patient. By this point in the paper, it comes as a surprise
to me, but not as a shock, that Searles took for a ride in his car a
patient for whom he was experiencing feelings of love and fantasies
of being married. In reading this passage, I feel “amazed” (p. 295), to
use Searles’ word, not shocked or horrified, by Searles’ capacity to
invent psychoanalysis anew for this patient (see Ogden, 2004a,
2005c). Not only has Searles grown emotionally in the course of the
work that he has presented to this point, but perhaps I, too, as reader,
have matured in the course of the experience of reading his work.
For me, the paper builds toward a moment near its end when
Searles speaks of his own experience as a parent and as a husband. I
will quote this passage in its entirety because no paraphrase, no set of
excerpts can convey the effect created by the force of Searles’ care-
fully chosen words:
Not only my work with patients but also my experiences as a

husband and a parent have convinced me of the validity of the
current concepts which I am offering here. Towards my daughter,
now eight years of age, I have experienced innumerable fantasies
and feelings of a romantic-love kind, thoroughly complementary
to the romantically adoring, seductive behaviour which she has
shown towards her father oftentimes ever since she was about two
or three years of age. I used at times to feel somewhat worried
when she would play the supremely confident coquette with me
and I would feel enthralled by her charms; but then I came to the
conviction, some time ago, that such moments of relatedness could
only be nourishing for her developing personality as well as
delightful to me. If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win the
heart of her father, her own father who has known her so well and
for so long, and who is tied to her by mutual blood-ties, I reasoned,
then how can the young woman who comes later have any deep
confidence in the power of her womanliness?
And I have every impression, similarly, that the oedipal desires
of my son, now eleven years of age, have found a similarly lively
and wholehearted feeling-response in my wife; and I am equally
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convinced that their deeply fond, openly evidenced mutual attrac-

tion is good for my son as well as enriching to my wife. To me it
makes sense that the more a woman loves her husband, the more
she will love, similarly, the lad who is, to at least a considerable
degree, the younger edition of the man she loved enough to
marry.
(p. 296, my italics)
In this passage, Searles simply states, on the basis of his experience,

what “makes sense” to him about the emotional effects that people
have on one another. Simply saying what “makes sense” on the basis
of one’s experience – I cannot think of a better way of conveying the
essential core of Searles’ analytic thinking and way of practising
psychoanalysis.
The movement of the paper as a whole, and of this passage in
particular, has the feel of a succession of photographs, each more skill-
fully crafted, each more successful in capturing the core of the subject
being photographed: the analytic relationship. The words and images
that are most alive for me in this passage – words and images that often
come to my mind during analytic sessions – are the ones that Searles
uses to describe the way his daughter, as a small child, could wrap him
around her little finger: “If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win
the heart of her father, . . . then how can the young woman who
comes later have any deep conviction in the power of her womanli-
ness?” (p. 296). But even as his daughter is sweeping him off his feet,
Searles’ wife, who earlier had stood in the shadows of his love for one
of his patients, now takes her place in the mutual feeling of love that
she and Searles experience, which is the source of the oedipal love
that they feel for their children. In the very experience of writing and
reading the paper, there is a movement from the experience of being
enthralled with the person one (oedipally) loves to the “restitution”
(Loewald, 1979, p. 393) of the parents’ adult love for one another as
the ballast for the oedipal experience (see Chapter 8).
As Searles’ paper proceeds, the reader becomes increasingly aware
of differences between Freud’s (explicit) and Searles’ (largely implicit)
conceptions of the Oedipus complex. Searles points out that in
Freud’s (1900) earliest description of the Oedipus complex (in The
Interpretation of Dreams), he “makes a fuller acknowledgement of the
parents’ participation in the oedipal phase of the child” (p. 297) than
he does in any of his subsequent writings:
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The parents too give evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: a natural

predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little
daughters while his wife takes her sons’ part.
(Freud, 1900, pp. 257–258; cited in Searles, 1959, p. 297)
Even this statement of the parents’ oedipal love for the child is a pale
rendering of what, in Searles’ hands, is a vibrant, living thing which
constitutes a good deal of the richness of human life, both for chil-
dren and for parents. But this is not the heart of the difference
between Searles’ and Freud’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex.
For Freud (1910, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1925), the story of the healthy
Oedipus complex is that of the child’s triangulated sexual desire and
romantic love for one parent, and his jealousy, intense rivalry and
murderous wishes for the other parent; the child’s fearful and guilty
renunciation (in the face of castration threats) of his sexual and
romantic desires toward his parents; and the internalization of the
threatening, punitive oedipal parents in the process of superego
formation.
By contrast, Searles’ version of the Oedipus complex is the story
of the child’s experience of reciprocated romantic and sexual love of
the parent (a wish “to marry” and make a family and home with that
parent). There is rivalry with, and jealousy of, the other parent, but
it is a far quieter affair than that involved in Freud’s conception of the
child’s murderous wishes for his parents. Searles’ version of the
oedipal experience does not end with the child feeling defeated by
castration threats and being left with an abiding sense of guilt and the
need to renounce and ashamedly hide sexual and romantic wishes for
the parent.
Instead, for Searles, the healthy Oedipus complex is the story of
love and loss, of reciprocated romantic parent–child love that is safe-
guarded by the parents’ firm but compassionate recognition of their
roles both as parents and as a couple. That recognition on the part of
the parents helps the child (and the parents themselves) to accept the
fact that this intense parent–child love relationship must be given up:
The renunciation is, I think, again [like the reciprocation of the

child’s oedipal love] something which is a mutual experience for
child and parent, and is made in deference to a recognizedly greater
limiting reality, a reality which includes not only the taboo main-
tained by the rival-parent, but also the love of the oedipally desired
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parent towards his or her spouse – a love which antedated the

child’s birth and the love to which, in a sense, he owes his very
existence.
(p. 302)
In this rendering of the Oedipus complex, the child emerges with a

feeling that his romantic and sexual love is accepted, valued and
reciprocated, along with a firm recognition of a “greater limiting
reality” within which he must live. Both elements – the love and the
loss – strengthen the child psychologically. The first element –
the reciprocated oedipal love – enhances the child’s self-esteem. The
second element – the loss involved in the waning of the oedipal
romance – contributes to the child’s sense of “a recognizedly greater
limiting reality” (p. 302). This sense of a greater limiting reality
involves an enhancement of the child’s capacity to recognize and
accept the unrealizability of his desires. This maturational step has far
more to do with the maturation of reality testing and the capacity to
differentiate internal and external reality than with the internalization
of a chastising, threatening, punitive version of the parents (that is,
superego formation). For Searles, the “heir” to the Oedipus complex
is not primarily the formation of the superego, but a sense of oneself
as a loving and lovable person who recognizes (with a feeling of loss)
the constraints of external reality.
We can hear in this passage a partial response to the question raised
earlier: “Is countertransference love, for Searles, less real than other
kinds of love?” Clearly the answer is no. What makes countertrans-
ference love different from other types of love is the analyst’s respon-
sibility to recognize that the love that he experiences for and from
the patient is an aspect of the analytic relationship and to make use of
it in the therapeutic work in which he is engaged with the patient:
These feelings [of love for the patient] come to him [the analyst]
like all feelings, without tags showing whence they have come,
and only if he is relatively open and accepting of their emergence
into his awareness does he have a chance to set about finding out
. . . their significance in his work with the patient.
(pp. 300–301)
The notion that feelings come to the analyst “without tags” is pivotal
to Searles’ conception of oedipal love in the countertransference
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and to his overall conception of psychoanalysis. The analyst’s task is

first and foremost to allow himself to experience the full emotional
intensity of all that he feels in the here-and-now of the analytic experience.
Only then is he in a position to make analytic use of his feeling state.
Unconscious identification
I will now turn to Searles’ “Unconscious identification” (1990), an

important but little known paper published in a collection of papers
by 14 analysts more than three decades after the “Oedipal love”
paper was published. The later paper reveals Searles’ clinical thinking
in its most highly developed form. There can be no doubt that the
speaker in Searles’ 1990 paper is the same person as the speaker in the
1959 paper, but now wiser, more artful in his work, more keenly
aware of his limitations. In his 1990 paper, Searles is even more spare
in his use of psychoanalytic theory than he was in the “Oedipal love”
paper. So far as I am able to discern, in his 1990 paper, Searles makes
use of only two analytic theories: the concept of the dynamic uncon-
scious and the concept of the transference–countertransference. The
effect of Searles’ paring away of theory to its absolute minimum is the
creation of an experience in reading that is akin to that of reading
fine literature: emotional situations and the characters involved in
these situations are allowed to speak for themselves.
Searles begins the paper with a metaphor:
My main purpose in this chapter is to convey a generous variety of

clinical vignettes wherein one can detect unconscious identifica-
tions ramifying beneath or behind a relatively simple and obvious
conscious one, something like a sea plant can be discovered to be
flourishing far beyond and beneath the few leaves that can be seen
on the water’s surface.
(1990, p. 211)
Searles lays out in this opening sentence his conception of how he

views the relationship of conscious and unconscious experience in
the analytic relationship. Conscious experience is “relatively simple
and obvious,” if one has developed an ear with which to notice it in
oneself and frame it for oneself; “beneath or behind” conscious expe-
rience is unconscious experience which is continuous with conscious
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experience, just as the “flourishing,” “ramifying” underwater parts of

the sea plant are continuous with “the few leaves that can be seen at
the water’s surface.” Implicit in this metaphor, as I read it, is the idea
that one need not be a marine biologist to notice a few of the quali-
ties of the sea plant, but the more one’s mind and senses are capable
of refined perception, the more one is likely to understand about the
way the plant works and how it has come to work in that way.
Moreover, a person with a trained eye is also more likely to feel
curious, puzzled and amazed by what he observes. And yet, as I hope
to show in the course of my discussion of this paper, Searles’ use of
this metaphor fails to capture what is most important about his way
of thinking and working.
In the first of the clinical illustrations, Searles describes his work
with an elderly woman who for many years had not heard from her
daughter. Having received a letter from her daughter (then in her
forties), the patient brought the letter to the session, not certain how
to reply to it. She gave it to Searles to read. On thinking about it,
Searles said, “I do feel a sense of not actually being you, and there-
fore, I feel uncomfortable as to how I might respond to it” (p. 214).
A bit later, Searles conversationally addresses the reader:
Actually, for me, the most memorable aspect of this interaction is

that, in the moment before reaching out to accept the letter, I felt
a very strong sense that it was not right for me to read the letter,
since I was not the person to whom the letter was addressed; the
force of this inhibition was striking to me, in light of her obvious
wish that I read it.
It then occurred to me, as I went on talking, and I said, “But I
wonder if you feel that you, likewise, are not the person to whom
that letter is addressed.” To this, she reacted in a strongly confirm-
atory fashion, saying that she had gotten a great deal of therapy
over the years since she had been involved in the kind of thing that
this letter was expressing. In essence, she strongly confirmed that
my sense of not in actuality being the intended recipient of the
letter had a counterpart in her strongly feeling, likewise, that she
was not the person to whom the letter was addressed. Her confir-
mation, here, was expressed in sufficiently pent-up feeling as to let
me know that she had needed this interpretation from me to
enable her to know and express these feelings so clearly.
(pp. 214–215)
170
The analytic event being presented hinges on Searles’ awareness in

the moment before he reached out to accept the letter that he felt
uncomfortable with the idea of reading a letter that was not written
to him. On the basis of this feeling/thought, Searles did something
with the situation that, for me, is astounding: he turned the experi-
ence “inside out” in his mind in a way that revealed something that
felt true to him, to the patient, and to me, as a reader. (With regard
to my use of the metaphor of turning experience inside out, it is
important to bear in mind that, like the surface of a Moebius strip,
inside is continually in the process of becoming outside and outside
becoming inside.) Searles took his feeling that it was not right to read
a letter not addressed to him – the “inside,” in the sense that it was
his own personal response – and made it “the outside.” By “outside,”
I mean the context, the larger emotional reality, within which he
was experiencing what was occurring between himself and the
patient, and, by extension, within which the patient was experi-
encing herself in relation to her daughter. It is precisely this sort of
reversal that is most surprising, often startling, about the experience
of reading Searles: there is an abrupt shift from Searles’ inner life (his
extraordinarily perceptive emotional response to what is occurring)
to the invisible psychological context within which the patient is
experiencing himself or herself.
It is important to note that the reversal to which I am referring is
not synonymous with making the unconscious conscious. What
Searles does is far more subtle than that. In this example, the patient’s
experience of no longer being the person her daughter imagines her
to be is not a repressed unconscious thought and feeling; rather, it is
part of the internal emotional environment in which the patient
lives. That as yet unnamed matrix of her self had come to constitute
a good deal of the truth of who she had become. In the interaction
described, it was necessary, first, for Searles to make a transformation
within himself in which context became content, the “invisible”
context of Searles’ sense of himself (as not being the person to whom
the letter was written), became the “visible,” thinkable content.
Searles, in the process of thinking out loud, came to the feeling/
idea that the patient did not experience herself as the person to whom
the letter was written: “It then occurred to me, as I went on
talking . . .” (p. 214). Searles was not saying what he thought; he was
thinking what he said. That is, in the very act of speaking, inner
was becoming outer, thinking was becoming talking, unthinkable
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context was becoming thinkable content, experience was being

turned inside out.
I will now turn to another example of Searles turning experience
inside out. In a clinical discussion later in the paper, he recounts
instances of being asked by patients, “How are you?” Searles describes
often feeling
that I would dearly love to be able to unburden myself, and tell

him in . . . detail of the myriad aspects of how I am feeling today;
but knowing how impossible this is, in light of our true situation
here, I react mainly with bitterly ironic amusement saying, “Just
grand,” or merely nodding.
(p. 216)
It eventually occurs to Searles, each time freshly and unexpectedly,

that the patient is feeling something very similar to Searles’ feelings,
i.e. that it is impossible under the circumstances to tell Searles how
he (the patient) feels. This is so because “he [the patient] is [feeling
that he is] supposed to be the one who is helping me” (p. 216) as was
the case in the patient’s childhood relationship with his parents.
When Searles comes to this type of understanding of the situation, he
remains silent and yet his grasp of what is occurring “nonetheless
enables me . . . to foster an atmosphere wherein the patient can feel
that he is being met with more of genuine patience and empathy
than had been the case before” (p. 216).
In this clinical situation, Searles realizes that a critical aspect of the
context of his emotional experience of being the analyst for his
patient has been his (Searles’) wish to be the patient in the analysis.
His hearing the bitterness in his own voice as he responds to the
patient’s question/invitation makes it possible for him to convert
unthinkable context into thinkable content. This transformation
allows Searles to communicate (nonverbally) an understanding of the
patient’s invisible (silent) bitterness about the fact that he does not
feel that he has the right to be the patient in his own analysis. Here,
again, Searles does the psychological work of transforming his own
“inner” emotional context (his wish that the analysis were his own
analysis) into “outer” (thinkable, verbally symbolized) thoughts and
feelings. This psychological work on Searles’ part contributes to a
change in the “atmosphere” of the analytic relationship. The formerly
unthinkable context for the patient’s experience (his sense that the
172
analysis was not his analysis) enters a process of being consciously

thought by Searles and unconsciously thought by the patient.
I will take a piece of Searles’ self-analytic work as a final illustration
of the way in which his thinking is, to a great extent, marked by his
unique way of turning experience inside out:
For many years I have enjoyed washing dishes, and not rarely have
had the feeling that this is the one thing in my life that I feel entirely
comfortably capable of doing. I have always assumed that, in my
washing of dishes, I was identifying with my mother, who routinely
did them in my early childhood. But in recent years . . . it has
occurred to me that I have been identifying with my mother not
only in the form but also in my spirit of washing the dishes. I had
not previously allowed myself to consider the possibility that she,
too, may have felt so chronically overwhelmed, so chronically out
beyond her depth in life, that this activity, this washing of dishes,
was the one part of her life with which she felt fully equipped to
cope comfortably.
(p. 224)
This paragraph could have been written by no one other than Searles
– in part because it involves such exquisite mastery of the art of
looking deeply into seemingly ordinary conscious experience. Searles
knows in a way that few analysts have known that there is only one
consciousness and that the unconscious aspect of consciousness is in
the conscious aspect, not under it or behind it. Paradoxically, Searles
knows this in practice and makes use of it in virtually every clinical
illustration he presents, but he has not, as far as I am aware, ever
discussed this conception of consciousness in his writing. Moreover,
in the opening sentence of the paper cited earlier, Searles explicitly
contradicts this understanding of the relationship of conscious and
unconscious experience when he says that unconscious identifica-
tions lie “behind and beneath” conscious identifications. I believe,
however, that this conception of the relationship between conscious
and unconscious experience (and the accompanying sea plant
metaphor) are not in keeping with the understanding of the relation-
ship between conscious and unconscious experience that Searles so
powerfully illustrates in this paper. I believe that it would more accu-
rately reflect what Searles demonstrates in his clinical work to say that
conscious and unconscious experience are qualities of a unitary
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consciousness and that we gain access to the unconscious dimension

of experience by looking into conscious experience, not by looking
“behind” it or “beneath” it.
In the account of his psychological state while washing dishes,
Searles had for years thought of his enjoyment of washing dishes and
his feeling that that is the “one thing in my life that I feel entirely
comfortably capable of doing,” as an identification in the “form,”
but not in the “spirit” of his mother washing dishes. The reader (and
Searles) are taken by surprise as Searles delves more deeply into his
experience of washing dishes. He becomes aware of what he already
“knew,” but did not know: his experience of washing dishes takes
place within a powerful, yet invisible emotional context of feelings
of profound inadequacy. Searles transforms this formerly unthinkable
context into thinkable emotional content: “I had not previously
allowed myself to consider the possibility that she, too, may have felt
so chronically overwhelmed, so chronically out beyond her depth in
life, that this activity, this washing of dishes, was the one part of her
life with which she felt fully equipped to cope comfortably” (p. 224).
The truth (and even beauty) of Searles’ newly created understanding
of himself and his mother is not merely described for the reader, it is
shown to the reader in the evocativeness of the imagery. The image
of Searles as a child watching his mother with a sink full of dishes in
soapy water not only captures the experience of the day-to-day life
of a boy with his depressed mother; it also conveys a sense of the
emotional shallowness (the very limited depth of a kitchen sink)
beyond which his mother dared not – could not – go.
Searles and Bion
I will conclude this paper by briefly discussing a complementarity

between Searles’ thinking and that of Bion which I “discovered” to
my surprise in the course of writing this paper. Searles was tempera-
mentally disinclined (and perhaps unable) to formulate his thoughts
at a level of abstraction beyond that of clinical theory. In stark
contrast, Bion, whose focus was on the development of psychoana-
lytic theory, gives the reader very little sense of the way in which he
makes use of his ideas in the analytic setting. In a highly condensed
way, I will address three aspects of the work of Searles and Bion in
174
which I suggest that the reader requires familiarity with the work of
both authors in order to fully appreciate either one.
The container–contained
In discussing Searles’ way of working with his patient’s request that

he read a letter written to her by her daughter, I introduced the idea
that Searles’ thinking might be thought of as “turning experience
inside out” – what begins as the invisible, unthinkable context of
experience is transformed by Searles into experiential content, about
which he and the patient may be able to think and talk. My meta-
phoric description of what Searles was doing (without my being
aware of it) drew on Bion’s (1962a) concept of the container–
contained. The concept of the container–contained provides a way
of thinking about the way in which psychological content (thoughts
and feelings) may overwhelm and destroy the very capacity for
thinking thoughts (the container) (see Ogden, 2004b, for a discussion
of Bion’s concept of the container–contained). Searles’ patient may
have harbored feelings of guilt of such intensity that they limited her
capacity to think her thoughts concerning the ways in which she had
changed, thus leaving her without the means to do unconscious
psychological work with them. Searles was able to think (contain)
something like the patient’s unthinkable thoughts concerning his
own guilt/uneasiness about the idea of reading a letter not addressed
to him. In telling the patient that he thought that she, too, did not
experience herself as the person to whom the letter was written,
Searles helped the patient to contain/think her own previously
unthinkable thoughts and feelings concerning the psychological
growth that she had achieved.
In formulating Searles’ work in this way, I am creating a vantage
point that is lacking in Searles’ work, i.e. a conception of the way in
which the analytic interaction involves at every turn the muscular
interplay of thoughts and the capacity to think one’s thoughts. At the
same time, Searles’ extraordinary capacity to describe the emotional
shifts occurring in the transference–countertransference brings to life
the experiential level of the workings of the container–contained in
ways that, to my mind, Bion was unable to achieve in his own
writing.
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Creative Readings
The human need for truth
Searing honesty (with himself and with the patient) permeates Searles’
accounts of his clinical work. Examples previously discussed in this
paper that come immediately to mind include Searles’ acknowl-
edging to himself (despite internal and external pressures to do other-
wise) his intense wishes to marry his patients when in the thick
of oedipal transference–countertransference experiences; Searles’
alarming awareness that he felt a depth of tenderness toward a male
schizophrenic patient that was greater than the love he felt for his
wife; and his recognition of his feelings of bitterness about the fact
that he was not the patient in the analysis that he was conducting
and, consequently, did not have the right to tell the patient at length
what he was feeling. While Searles clearly believes that straightfor-
wardly facing the truth of what is occurring in the analytic relation-
ship is an indispensable element in analytic work, it took Bion to
formulate this clinical awareness at a higher level of abstraction,
namely, that the most fundamental principle of human motivation is
the need to know the truth about one’s lived emotional experience.
“[T]he welfare of the patient demands a constant supply of truth as
inevitably as his physical survival demands food” (Bion, 1992, p. 99).
Searles is without peer in demonstrating what that need for truth
looks like and feels like in the transference–countertransference and
how it shapes the analytic experience; Bion put the idea into words,
located it in relation to analytic theory as a whole, and created an
understanding of the human condition that placed the need for truth
at its core.
Reconceiving the relationship between conscious and

unconscious experience
It is evident in Searles’ description of his analytic work that the rela-

tionship between the analyst’s conscious and unconscious experience
is being conceived of quite differently from the way in which
that interplay is ordinarily thought of. Though he does not state it
explicitly, Searles shows the reader what it means to make use of
consciousness as a whole – that is, to create conditions in the analytic
setting in which the analyst perceives what is occurring in the trans-
ference–countertransference by means of a form of consciousness
176
characterized by a seamless continuity of conscious and unconscious

experience. Bion recognized in his own work what Searles demon-
strates in his clinical accounts, and used that recognition to revolu-
tionize analytic theory by radically altering the topographic model.
Bion’s alteration of the topographic model is nothing less than
breathtaking in that it had been impossible, at least for me, to imagine
psychoanalysis without the idea of an unconscious mind somehow
separate from (“below”) the conscious mind. The conscious and
unconscious “minds,” for Bion, are not separate entities, but dimen-
sions of a single consciousness. The apparent separateness of the
conscious and unconscious parts of the mind is, for Bion (1962a),
merely an artifact of the vantage point from which we observe and
think about human experience. In other words, consciousness and
unconsciousness are aspects of a single entity viewed from different
vertices (see Ogden, 2004a). The unconscious is always a dimension
of consciousness whether or not it is easily perceptible, just as the
stars are always in the sky whether or not they are obscured by the
glare of the sun.
Bion (1962a) developed his concept of “reverie” (a state of recep-
tivity to one’s own and the patient’s conscious/unconscious experi-
ence) concurrently with Searles’ early descriptions (written in the
1950s and 1960s) of his work with chronic schizophrenic patients in
which he makes use of a state of mind that blurs the distinction
between conscious and unconscious aspects of experience. It is
impossible to say to what extent Bion was influenced by Searles or
Searles by Bion. Searles makes reference only to Bion’s relatively
early work on projective identification; Bion makes no reference at
all to Searles’ work. Nonetheless, what I hope to have demonstrated
is that Searles’ work is enriched conceptually by a knowledge of
Bion’s work and Bion’s work is brought more fully to life experien-
tially by a familiarity with Searles’ work.
177
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185
Index
acting in 164 35, 39, 51, 54; Klein’s 19; of

acting out 103, 164 melancholia 22; of narcissism 22;
addictive love: bonds of 64–5, 68, 75; object relations 11– 33; 51, 55–75,
central role in internal world 55; 144; of Oedipus complex 139–40;
diminution of 71 Searles’ 169; of transformations 102;
aggression: in Fairbairn’s endopsychic and truth 176; of unconscious
structure 63, 71 internal objects 25; way of not
aggressive instinct 139 thinking, use as 117, 127; Winnicott’s
aliveness: and deadness 31–2, 33, 87 45, 77, 79, 90
alpha-elements 46, 101, 102 ancestors: analytic 117, 141; becoming
alpha function 46, 102, 107, 158 147; creation of 142, 146; to
ambivalence: of depressive position 80; succeeding generations 141
Freud’s view of 29, 31; and mania 31; animism 7
and melancholia 7, 8, 18, 25, 29, 31; atonement: anterior to incest 152; of
between unconscious internal oedipal relations 149–51, 152; and
objects 33 Oedipus complex 156; of parricide
analyst: as-transference-mother 80 149–51, 152, 155, 156; and superego
analytic frame: as medium for analyst’s 149, 150, 153; in transmutation 150
hatred 81–2; Attention and interpretation 97, 98,
analytic relationship 41, 74–5, 79, 90, 103–9, 118
115, 157, 160, 161, 166, 168,
169, 172 bad objects: allegiance to 25; better
analytic style 117, 128; Bion’s 118–37 than no objects 59; love for 59
analytic technique 83–4; 117 Balint, M. 56
analytic theory: of alpha function 158; Barros, E.&Barros, E. 44
Bion’s 4, 35, 101, 102, 103, 158, 174, “basic endopsychic situation” 60, 71
176, 177; and clinical observation Bellow, S. 50
157–8; of conscious and unconscious beta-elements 101, 102, 107
experience 177; of depression 79; binocular vision 58
Fairbairn’s 55, 56–62; Freud’s 12–13, Bion, W.R.: alpha-elements 46, 101,
17, 22, 25; of instincts 144; Isaacs’ 34, 102; alpha function 46, 102, 107,
186
Index
158; analyst’s task 131; analytic style, 177; waking-life 135, 136; writing
of 118–137; Attention and of 101
interpretation 97, 98, 103–9, 118; Borges, J.L. 6, 78, 106, 107, 113,
becoming an analyst 128–9; 143n, 146
beta-elements 101, 102, 107; Bornstein, M. 50
binocular vision 58; Brasilia Seminar, Boyer, B. 147
No. 1 118–24, Brasilia Seminar, No. 3 Brasilia Seminar, No. 1 118–24
124–134; Brasilia Seminar, No. 8 135; Brasilia Seminar, No. 3 124–34
“Clinical Seminars” 117–37; Brasilia Seminar, No. 8 135
cogitation 99; container-contained breakdown, fear of: Winnicott 4, 40–1
158, 175–6; dreaming 10, 28, 40, 46, Breuer, J. and Freud, S.: originality 5–6;
50, 102–3, 107, 109, 122, 134, 135; Studies in Hysteria 6, 140–1
dreams 50–1; 109, 134; “early” 97, British Psychoanalytic Society:
102–3, 107–8, 177; Elements of Controversial Discussions 34
Psycho-Analysis 97; emergence
105–6; emotional problem 124, Cambray, J. 106
129–31, 134; epistemophilic castration 140, 144, 156, 167
impulse 50; function 101, 102; central ego 52, 56, 61–2, 63, 68, 70–1
“imaginative conjecture” 129; Chestnut Lodge 161
interplay of paranoid-schizoid and child analysis 46
depressive positions 45; child’s behavior: context of 37; details
interpretation 103, 105, 106, 107, of 36
115–16, 120, 121, 123, 125–32, 133; Chodorow, N. 144
Klein 50; knowing (K) 105–6; Chomsky, N.: deep structure of
language, use of 100, 101, 104; “late” language 4, 49
97, 103, 104, 107–8; Learning from “Clinical Seminars” 117–37
experience 97–102, 104; “learning cogitation 99
from experience” 29, 99, 101, 103, “coincidences” 92–3, 94–5
108, 121, 123; memory 109–10; “O” consciousness: continuity with
103–8, 109, 115, 116; non-psychotic unconsciousness 177; differentiation
parts of personality 45, 122, 125, from unconsciousness 102, 134;
129, 130, 134, 135–6; obscurities Fairbairn’s view of 63; make use of
98–9, 100, 101, 102, 107; phantasy 176; only one 173–4, 177; phantasy
50; projective identification 38, 177; as generating a state of 44;
and psychoanalytic theory 4, 35, 101, unconscious aspect of 173–4; 176–7;
102, 103, 158, 174, 176, 177; as unforeseeable emergence 105–6
psychosis 28; psychotic part of contact barrier 134
personality 45, 122, 134, 135–6; container-contained 158, 175–6; like
reading 1, 3, 97–116; reverie 103, Searles’ “turning experience inside
108, 177; São Paulo Seminar, No. 1 out” 175–6
134–6; Searles 158, 174–7; sleeping contempt: bonds of 68–70, 75;
and dreaming 10; supervisor, style as diminution of 71; and feeling
125–7; as theorist 55, 117; “a slighted 61; of internal saboteur
theory of functions” 101, 102; 68–9; and mania 31; object of 73;
theory of thinking 4, 35; thinking role of in the unconscious 55;
of 97; truth 50, 51, 104, 106–7, substitutes for love 28
108, 135, 136, 158, 176; vertices 108, control, contempt, and triumph 31
187
Index
Controversial Discussions 34, 53 sexual 139; of speech 36; Spitz 37;
corrective emotional experience 162 unintegration and integration in 83
countertransference: acting out 103; Development 151n
fantasy 159, 161, 164; love 158–69; Developments in Psychoanalysis 34
role of 79 disappointment 18, 22, 23, 24, 25,
creativity 93 28, 132
critical agency 17, 19, 20, 25, 60 disillusionment 55, 71, 75
disintegration 58–9
deadness: and aliveness 31–2, 33, 87 dissociation 87, 89
death instinct 61 dreaming: alpha function, form of 46,
defense mechanisms 39 102; an analysis 122; the analytic
delusional belief 120 session 109; Bion, 10, 28, 40, 46, 50,
dependence, primitive 71 102–3, 107, 109, 122, 134, 135;
depression: analyst’s 79–81; clinical 80; capacity for 103; conversation
and depressive position 80; dynamic between unconscious and
structure of 79–80; unconscious preconscious 14, 29; dissociation of
fantasy of 79; following 89; into existence 122, 130; Freud
interpretations 107; Freud’s theory 14; generating difference between
of 79; intergenerational origins, conscious and unconscious 102; and
79–80; Klein’s theory of 79; and hallucination 134; a life 164; as
melancholia 14; mother’s 79–80, 174; meaning-generating 103; and
patient’s 79–81; Winnicott’s theory mourning 28; and “O” 107;
of 79–81 reflecting ways of thinking 39–40,
depressive position: achievement of 46; and reverie 115; as symbolizing
80n; conception of 102; interplay 28, 103; as unconscious thinking 46,
with paranoid schizoid position 45; 50; and waking 134
stage of development 80n dream-life 88, 136
desire: in countertransference 159, 162; dreams: Bion 50–1; 109, 134; and
erotic 162; of exciting object 64; children 87–8; that float into the
father as object of 139–40; mind 109; Freud 13, 14; in Freud–
incestuous 152, 153; for mother’s Klein era 39; Grotstein 45; and
breast 46; oedipal 165, 167–8; of hallucinations 134, 136; and oedipal
patient 165; as phantasy 46; as love 164; and phantasy 42; and
“psychic dynamism” 61; sexual 14, reflective self 115; symbolic content
139, 152, 167; unconscious 52; of unconscious thoughts 39; and
unrealizability of 168 thinking 50–1; Winnicott 87; word
despair: and triumph 28 “dreams” 13
development: of capacity for thinking dream-work: Sandler 45
48; continuity versus discontinuity of drives 144
36–7; infantile 37; “of interest in the dynamic structure: of depression 80; as
external world” 4, 50; Isaacs 37; most theoretical term 56
mature aspects of 161; narcissistic 23; dynamic unconscious 169
normative stage of 80; pre-oedipal
154; primitive emotional 76–96; of ego: central 52, 56, 61–2, 63, 68, 70–1;
psyche-soma 90; psychic 45–8, 55, critical activity of 19, 20; ego-loss 17,
58, 60; as a psychoanalyst 3; 19; and internal object relationship
psychological 37, 38, 46, 51, 90, 139; 59; “flight into” 24; Freud
188
Index
reconceiving of 17; as “I” 60, 61; and internal object 32, 59, 60; relatedness
id 53, 60; identification of 19, 20; to 23, 28; Winnicott 3; world 3, 19,
identified-with-the-object 20, 25, 52, 89
62; and inner reality 51; external reality: acceptance of 93;
identification of 19; in Klein’s capacity to recognize 44; and central
metaphor of unconscious 19n; ego 70–1; disconnecting from 20;
libidinal 5, 25, 56, 61, 62–70, 74; evasion of 28; Fairbairn 58, 60; Freud
libidinal cathexis of 23; and libido 49; and hallucination 91; and infant
19, 23, 31; -loss 17, 19; and 36, 37, 47, 89, 92; and internal reality
melancholia 15–16, 17, 19, 20, 26; 44–5, 47, 168; Klein 58; knowledge
and mourning 7–8, 29–30; and of 49; modulating effects of 94; and
Oedipus complex 142, 149; as omnipotent thinking 48; and
phantasying 52, 53; and primary phantasy 4, 42, 44, 47–50; primacy
narcissism 23; as psychic structure 17; of 58; and psychic reality 41–2;
regressed aspects of 62; relationship recognizing 44; “taking flight” from
between aspects of 59, 60; and 28; Winnicott 89
repression 142; as self 52, 53, 60, 61; external world: infant and 93; interest
and shadow of the object 19, 20; in 4, 50; and internal object world
split-off parts of 17, 19, 20, 25, 28, 19, 71; Klein 19n; knowledge of 49,
32, 52, 53, 60; splitting of 60; and 50; lived emotional experience in
superego 19, 52, 53, 60, 140, 148, 46; and phantasy 4, 47–8, 50
149–51, 156, 167, 168; structure 61;
as a suborganization 52, 55, 60, 71; as Fairbairn, W.R.D.: addictive love 55, 64,
a term 59; unconscious part of 25–6 71, 74, 75; aggression 63, 71; “the
ego-identified-with-the-object 20, 25 basic endopsychic situation” 60, 71;
ego-libido 23 central ego 52, 56, 61–2, 63, 68,
ego structure 61 70–1; contempt 68–70, 75; ego and
Elements of Psycho-Analysis 97 id 53, 60; ego and self 60, 61; ego,
emancipation: genuine 10; and manic split off parts of 52, 60; emotional
defense 31; urge for 144–56 life of internal objects 63–4;
emergence 105–6 endopsychic structure 9, 51, 53, 56,
Emerson, E. 1 60–1, 68, 70–1; “Endopsychic
emotional problem 50–1, 120, 123, structure considered in terms of
124, 129–31, 134 object-relationships” 53, 56; exciting
endopsychic structure 9, 51, 53, 56, object 5, 25, 56, 60–70, 71, 74;
60–1, 68, 70–1 external object world 52; external
“Endopsychic structure considered in reality 58, 60; Freud 61; Greenberg
terms of object-relationships” 53, 56 and Mitchell 56; Grotstein 56;
epistemophilic instinct 50, 51 Guntrip 56; internal object 5, 19, 51,
exciting object 5, 25, 56, 60–70, 71, 74 59, 60, 63–4; internal object relations
external object: as abandoned object 19, 52, 55, 59, 60, 64, 69; internal
20; use as analytic object 122; Bion object world 5, 19, 52, 55, 59, 60–4,
122; cut off from world of 28–9, 33; 69; internal saboteur 5, 56, 62–3,
disappointing 24; and infant 89, 91; 65–71, 74; Isaacs 9, 51–4; Kernberg
and mania 28–9; and melancholia 20, 56; Klein 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 61;
28; mother 59; and narcissistic Kohut 56; language, use of 56, 57,
identification 23; replaced by 72; libidinal ego 5, 25, 56, 61, 62–70,
189
Index
74; libido 58, 59, 63, 71; love/hate Freud–Klein era: dreams in 39; Isaacs
bond 25; model of the mind 55; 40; of psychoanalysis 39; transition
Modell 56; mother 56–9, 61–2, from 54
65–6, 69, 70, 75; no object Freud, S.: ambivalence 29, 31; Bion 28;
relationship at all 26; object relating Breuer 6, 141; castration 140; critical
and object–seeking 90; object agency 17, 19, 20, 25, 60; death
relations theory 11, 51, 58, 60, 64; instinct 61; desire 90; dreaming, role
Oedipus complex 138; phantasy 51, of 14; dreams 13, 14; disturbance of
52, 58; place in psychoanalysis 56; self-regard 13, 14–15, 16, 19; ego 17,
psychic development 55, 57; 24; ego and id 53; ego and
psychoanalytic theory 55, 56–62; melancholia 15, 16, 17, 19, 60;
psychological growth 71–3, 75; Fairbairn 19n, 55, 61, 102; Ferenczi
reading 1, 55–75; rejecting object 5, 12; “Instincts and their vicissitudes”
56, 61, 62–3, 65–6, 67, 69, 71; 12; The Interpretation of Dreams 12,
resentment 65, 75; Rinsley 56; 14, 166–7; Isaacs 19n, 42, 49, 50, 53;
satisfactory objects and unsatisfactory Klein 19n, 34, 41, 53, 61, 79; -Klein
objects 5, 59, 62; Scharff and Scharff era 39, 54; language, use of 7, 13, 14,
56; schizoid psychopathology 57; 15, 19, 20, 26–7, 28; Loewald 138,
“Schizoid factors in the personality” 139, 142, 143, 149, 154, 155–6;
56; Second Discussion Meeting 51, mania 31–3, 32n; melancholia 7, 8,
53; Sutherland 56; Symington 56; 14–18, 22–9; “A metapsychological
terminology of 56; thinking of 5, 56, supplement to the theory of dreams”
63; view of unconscious 55, 63; 12; mania 26–8, 31, 32; model of the
Winnicott 9; writing of 5, 56 mind 16, 19, 32; mourning 7, 8,
fantasy: countertransference 159, 161, 14–17, 29; “Mourning and
164; of depressed patient 81; of melancholia” 7, 8, 11–33, 52, 60;
depression 79; lacking “brakes” 93–4, “On narcissism: An Introduction”
144; of oedipal child 159; 22–3; narcissism 22–5; object
omnipotent 93–5; of manic relations theory 11, 13, 17, 19n, 24,
defense 31; and reality 161; 28, 29, 31, 32; Oedipus complex
representations of object relations 138–40, 142, 143, 148, 154, 155,
154; universal unconscious 140; 166–7; phantasy 41, 50; primal
see also phantasy phantasy 49, 140; psychoanalytic
father: authority of 153; castration by theory 12–13, 17, 22, 25; reading 1,
140; erotic attachment to 139–40; 3; repression 142; “Repression” 12;
identification with 139; in Oedipal Searles 166–7; sexual desire 14;
complex 139, 146; as punitive rival sexual instinct 61, 139; Standard
139; symbolic presence of 87; wish Edition of the Complete Psychological
to kill 139 Works of Sigmund Freud 13; structural
Faulkner, W. 85 model 18, 19n, 35, 53, 55, 102, 149;
fear of breakdown 4, 40–1 Studies in Hysteria 6; superego 19, 52,
Ferenczi, S. 12 53, 60, 148, 167; theory of
Fervor to Buenos Aires 6 depression 11–33, 79; topographical
Ficciones 78 model 19n, 102, 158, 177; “The
Freud, A.: defense mechanisms 39; unconscious” 12; view of the
Institute of Psychoanalysis in unconscious 41–2, 88; voice, of 13,
London 56 18, 32; Winnicott 79; writing and
190
Index
thinking of 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, id: and ego 53, 60
26, 27, 32, 60 identification: of ego 19; with
Frost, R. 78, 85, 86n, 107 abandoning object 20, 22; conscious
frustration 57, 84, 93, 132 173–4; with father 139; with loved
function: alpha 46, 102, 107, 158; Bion and loving objects 71; narcissistic
101, 102; ego 52; meaning- 23–5; with object 19, 20; with
generating 103; mental 36, 46; of oedipal parents 149; primary 153–4;
phantasy 4, 35, 50, 52, 54 and superego formation 149;
unconscious 169–73
Gabbard, G. 132, 161 illusion: melancholia 8; Winnicott 91,
Gay, P. 12, 24 92, 94, 95
generations: creations of previous 138, incest: atonement 152; destroys
142; difference between 147, 153; demarcation between generations
face-off between 145; succeeding 153; superego 152–3
138, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148; incestuous object 138–9; 152–5, 156
task of new 138 incorporation: and superego formation
“genetic continuity” 36 149
Green, A: aliveness and deadness 31; infantile development 37
internal object world 31 infant, mind of: Bion 38; Isaacs 38;
Greenberg, J. & Mitchell, S.A. 56 Rosenfeld 38; Winnicott 38
grief 28, 31, 81 infant observation 46
Grotstein, J.: dreamer who dreams the influence: and originality 140–1; of
dream 45; Fairbairn 56; talking to parents via parricide 150
patient’s unconscious 125; instinct theory: and object relations
unconscious psychological work 45 theory 144
group dynamics 66 instinct: aggressive 139; aim of 49;
growth, psychological 65, 72, 71, 75, bodily 14, 144; death 61; -driven
108, 125, 175 phantasying 52; ego 61;
guilt 69, 79, 81, 139–40, 152, 167, 175 epistemophilic 50–1; mental
Guntrip, H. 56 expression of 45; mental
representation 52; Oedipus complex,
hallucination: and dreams 136; and motivated by 142; sexual 61, 139;
external reality 91; of infant 91, theory 144
93, 94 “Instincts and their vicissitudes” 12
Hamlet 107 Institute of Psychoanalysis in London
hate: and ambivalence 24, 29; analyst’s 55–6
81–2; and love 25, 26, 29, 33, 64, 79, integration 82–3; 87
93–4; and melancholia 25, 29; internal object: bad 25; bonds of love
and pathological love 65; and hate 33; central ego, relationship
and primitive love 2; reader’s to 70–1; dead 33; emotional life of
81–2 63–4; endopsychic existence of 9, 51;
Heaney, S. 78 as evading object loss 20; and
Heimann, P.: Developments in external world 19, 71; Fairbairn 5, 9,
Psychoanalysis 34; Institute of 19, 51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 63–4; Freud
Psychoanalysis in London 56 17, 20, 24, 60; hated and hating 25;
human symbology 14 identity of 9, 51; and internal subject
hysteria 140–1 60; Isaacs 19n, 35, 52, 53; Klein 19n,
191
Index
51, 53, 158; libidinal tie to 5, 62; and introjection: and superego
mania 28–9; of mother’s depression formation 149
80; mother 61, 62, 80; Ogden 19, 62; Isaacs, S.: Bion 35, 38, 45, 46, 50; child’s
organized structure of 9, 51; behavior, details of 36, 38; context
phantasy and 9, 19n, 35, 47, 51–3; of observed data 36, 38; continuity
replacing external object 59, 60; vs. discontinuity in development
split-off parts of central ego 52, 68; 36–7; Developments in Psychoanalysis
as subdivision of a subject 68; 34; ego and id 53; epistemophilic
superego as 52, 53; Winnicott 3; impulse 50; external reality 44;
world 3, 5, 19n, 28–9, 31, 52, 53, 55, Fairbairn 9, 51–4; Fairbairn, letter
59, 60–4, 68, 69, 158 from 51; Freud, A. 39; Freud 19n, 42,
internal object relations: central ego 71; 49, 50, 53; in Freud–Klein era 39–40,
enlivening or deadening 31–2; 54; “genetic continuity” 36;
Fairbairn 19, 52, 55, 59, 60–2, 64, 69; Grotstein 45; “I-ness” and otherness
fantasized 32, 35; Freud 17, 20, 24–5, in phantasy 47; instinct 46, 49, 52;
32, 35, 60; between internal saboteur internal objects and internal object
and rejecting object 65–7; and relations 19n, 35, 52, 53; interpretive
incestuous fantasies 153; Isaacs 19n, act, phantasying as 43, 45; Klein 34,
35, 52, 53; Klein 19n, 53; 39, 50, 53–4; language, use of 4, 40,
melancholia 24–5; Ogden 19n, 62; 44; and meaning 42–8, 54; mental
pathological 25; satisfactory and life, phantasies giving 45–6; mental
unsatisfactory 75; split-off part of operations, phantasy as 39;
ego, formed by 20, 59–60; methodology 37–8; “The nature and
transference 40; unconscious function of phantasy” 4, 34;
organized around 32; unloving “particular sorts of phantasy” 39;
mother as 59, 61–2, 69 phantasy 4, 9, 34–54; phantasying
internalization: of object 20, 59, 153; of 34–54; psychic reality 41–2, 44;
oedipal object relations 149, 150, psychoanalytic theory 34, 35, 39, 51,
151, 153–4, 167–8 54; reading 1, 3; Rivière 39, 42;
internal reality: as closed system 62; and Rosenfeld 38; Second Discussion
external reality 44–5, 47, 168; and Meeting 51, 53; Segal, 45; self–object
phantasy in 47–8 differentiation, phantasying in 46, 47;
internal saboteur 5, 56, 62–3, 65–71, 74 theory of thinking 34 –54; “the
internal subject 60, 68 transference situation” 40, 54;
The Interpretation of Dreams 12, 14, unconscious thinking, phantasy as 4,
166–7 38–42, 45, 46, 48, 50–1, 52, 54;
interpretation: toward analyst’s and Winnicott 9, 39–40; in Winnicott–
patient’s experience 114; Bion 103, Bion era 39–40, 54
105, 106, 107, 115–16, 120, 121, 123,
125–32, 133; as conversation 128; James, H. 85
good 84; inadequacy of 115–16, 123;
resistance 83, 84; silent 83; toward Karp, G. and Berrill, M. 37, 151n
supervisee 125, 129, 133; Kaywin, R. 144
unobtrusive 120; where comes Kernberg, O. 56
from 127 King, P. 44
interpretive act: phantasying as 43–5 Klein, M.: Bion 50; control, contempt,
interpretive subject 43, 44 and triumph 31n; depression, theory
192
Index
of 79; depressive position 45, 80n, parents 149; incest 152–3; incestuous
102; Developments in Psychoanalysis object 138–9, 152–3; incestuous
34; epistemophilic instinct 50; object relationship 152–5; influence
external reality 58; Fairbairn 51, 53, and originality 140–1, 154; instinct
55, 56, 58, 61; Freud 34, 41, 53, 61, theory 144; language of 148, 155;
79; Freud–Klein era 39, 54; as heretic metamorphic internalization of
34; Institute of Psychoanalysis in oedipal parents 148–52, 153–4;
London 56; internal objects 19n, 51, “more than a repression” 143;
53, 158; internal object relations 19n, non-incestuous objects 152; Oedipus
53; Isaacs 34, 39, 50, 51, 53–4; loving, complex 138–56; parental authority
hating, and making reparations 90; 143–7, 149; parricide 143–8,
mania 31n; manic defense 31n; 149–51, 153, 156; reading 1, 3, 10;
object relations theory 19n, 51, 58; 138–56; restitution 150, 151, 166;
Oedipus complex 138; paranoid- “something rich and strange” 154;
schizoid position 45, 102; phantasy, superego 148–9, 150–1, 152, 156;
conception of 39, 41, 50, 51, 58; thinking, way of 138, 155;
projective identification 39; and transitional incestuous object
psychoanalytic theory 19n; reading relationship 152–5; transmutation of
2; spatial metaphors of unconscious oedipal parents 150–1; “the troubling
19n, 158; split off aspects of ego 19n; but rewarding richness of life”
symbol formation 50; structure of 154–5; “The waning of the Oedipus
unconscious 19n; teaching 2; as complex” 138–56; writing of
theorist 39, 55; unconscious, 138, 155
conception of 19n; voice of 31 Lorenz, K. 43
knowing (K) 105–6 love: accepting of 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 70;
knowledge 49, 50 addictive 55, 64–5, 68, 71, 74, 75;
Kohut, H. 56; Oedipus complex 138 adult 166; and ambivalence 29;
analyst’s 79, 81, 161, 162; as bad 70;
Lacan, J.: Oedipus complex 138 of bad objects 59; bonds of 26, 33,
language: deep structure of 4, 49, 50 68, 75; capacity to 14, 57, 58; and
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.– B. 142 contempt 28; countertransference
“learning from experience” 29, 99, 101, 157–69; as destructive 55, 81;
103, 108, 121, 123 developmental need to 162;
Learning from experience 97–102, 104 displacement of 23; erotic 25; failure
libidinal ego 5, 25, 56, 61, 62–70, 74 to 57; falling in 148, 153, 159, 161;
libido: and ego 19, 23, 31; in Fairbairn’s and hate 25–6, 29, 33, 64, 79, 93–4;
internal object world 63; fixation of imitations of 68; lack of 57, 59; loss
in melancholia 7, 8. 18, 31; in hate of 58, 167; and melancholia 29; of or
and love 29; hemorrhaging of 59; by mother 56–9, 65, 70, 89;
loss of 58, 59; and mania 23; and narcissistic 68, 79; nascent 59;
narcissistic love 68; object– 23 non-countertransference 160; object
Loewald, H.: atonement 149, 150–1, 3, 8, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 59, 81,
152, 153, 155, 156; emancipation, 165; oedipal 157 –69; pathological
urge for 10, 144, 147, 153, 155; 65–6; pre-oedipal 139; primitive 2–3;
enlivening “fire” of unconscious 29; pursuit of 69; rejecting of 56, 70;
Freud 138, 139, 142, 143, 149, 154, romantic 162, 163, 165, 167, 168;
155–6; identification with oedipal sexual 167, 168; substitutes for 28;
193
Index
and superego 150; ties of 25; toxic mind, model of the: Freud 16, 19, 32;
effects of 59; transference- Fairbairn 55; as inner world 55;
countertransference 161, 163; structural 149
unaccepting of 58; unable to 58; Mitchell, S.A. 56, 144
the verb 3 model of the mind: Freud 16, 19, 32;
Fairbairn 55; as inner world 55;
mania: and grief 31; and ambivalence structural 149
31; and disappointment 28; Modell, A. 56
economics of 27; and external mother: acceptance of 56–9, 72, 75;
objects 28–9; Freud’s explanation of analyst-as-transference 80; breast of
31–3, 32n; and internal objects 28–9; 46, 89; and child 89–95; claim to the
Klein 31n; and loss 26; and 153; -as-context 38; deficits in love
melancholia 26–7; and object of 56–8; depression of 79–80, 174;
relations theory 28; psychotic “doing this and that to” 47; external
edge of 26–9; triumph in object 59; face of 10, 83, 84, 86;
26, 28 feeling hated by 163; healthy 78;
manic defense: fantasy of 31n -infant dual unity 152; -infant
McLaughlin, B.P. 106 relationship 38; instinctual urges of
melancholia: abandoned object 20, 22; 90; internal object 61, 62, 80; lifeless
abandoning object 60; ambivalence 93; lived experience with the 52, 89,
7, 8, 18, 25, 29; defining features of 90, 91, 93; love of 56–9, 65; love by
25; disturbance of self-regard 13–17, 56–9; 70; love of 58; to “marry”
19; ego 15–16, 17, 19, 20, 26; and one’s 159; as object of sexual desire
external object 20, 28; and hate 25, 139; oedipal fantasies of 159;
29; “the key to the clinical picture psychological life of 38; the real 53;
of ” 22; libido 7, 8, 18, 19, 23, 29, 31; rejecting 57, 61–2, 65–6, 69, 70; of
living and dead 29; loss 7; love and Searles 174; separateness from 38,
hate 29; and mania 26–7; mental 80n, 91; tantalizing 61–2; toxic effect
activities of 7; and mourning 7, on 63; traumatizing experience with
11–33; “Mourning and melancholia” 70; unloving 57–9, 61–2, 64, 70, 75;
7, 11–33; and narcissism 22–5; object unsatisfactory relationship with
loss 15, 17, 19–20, 22; 23–4; object 57, 60
relations theory of 22, 29; outrage mourning: absence of disturbance of
18, 20, 24, 25; psychoanalytic self-regard 15; capacity for 29;
theory of 22; psychotic edge continuing to be emotionally alive 8;
of 26, 28; rage 8, 28, 60; revolt 18; death of the object 7, 29–30; and
and sadism 25; tie to object 15, dreaming 28; and ego 7–8; 29–30;
22, 25; unconscious internal work incapacity for 23–4; irrevocable loss
of 16 7, 15, 24; and melancholia 7, 8,
memory 102, 105, 109–10, 112 11–33; mental activities of 7;
mental mechanisms 39, 40 “Mourning and melancholia” 7,
mental operations 39, 101 11–33, 52; normal effect of 13, 14;
mental processes 40, 43 symbolizing pain 28; unconscious
metamorphosis 149, 151 work of 8, 12, 32
“A metapsychological supplement to “Mourning and melancholia” 7; 11–33,
the theory of dreams” 12 52; misreading of 24; time of
Milner, M. 56 writing 12
194
Index
“On narcissism: An introduction” 22 51–3, 55, 59–60, 62–6, 68, 70–2, 75,
narcissism: analytic style opposite of 80, 153, 158; internalized 20, 59,
129; Freud 22–4; concept of 22; 153; killing of 8, 31; Klein 19n, 31n;
disease of 23; and identification libido 23; loosely bound to 86; loss
23–5; and melancholia 22–5; and 15, 17, 19–20, 23–4, 79; lost 20, 22,
object love 23; and object tie 22–4; 24, 28, 31, 31n, 79; love 3, 8, 17–18,
opposite of analytic style 129; 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 59, 81, 165; loved
primary 22–3; theory of 22; 8, 17, 18, 22, 79, 81; loving 5, 63; and
regressing to 22 mourning 7–8; narcissistic tie to 23,
narcissistic mental disorders 13 24, 71; non-incestuous 152; oedipal
“The nature and function of phantasy”: 153; otherness of 23; outrage at 25;
about definition of phantasy 35; and parental 147; physical 4; pre-
external reality 4; about depressive relationship to 79;
“phantasying” 35; scientific and primitive love 2–3; psychically
political paper 34 present 8; rejecting 5, 56, 62–3, 65–6,
Non-psychotic part of personality 45, 67, 69, 71; relatedness 24, 37, 47, 139,
122, 125, 129, 130, 134, 135–6 143, 153, 156, 161; -relating 90;
satisfactory 5, 63; -seeking 90; self–
“O”: being and becoming 106; 46, 47, 70; self-identified-with-the-
“common to himself ” 103, 104; 62; 46; separate 20, 72, 153; of sexual
without defining, use 105; evolutions desire 139; shadow of 19, 20;
of 105–6; of experience of reading subject- 16, 47; tie to 8, 15, 18, 22,
103, 104; and “K” 105–6; meanings 23, 24, 25, 71, 156; transitional 161;
of 105; present moment 107, 109; undifferentiated 138–9, 153, 154,
reality of what is 104; truth of what 156; unloving and unaccepting 5, 62;
is 106; unknowable 104; and verb unsatisfactory 5, 53, 62, 63, 71;
“to be” 106; of the unconscious 109, whole 80n, 153; word object 3
115, 116 object-loss 15, 17, 19–20, 22, 23–5, 79
object: abandoned of 19, 20, 22; object-love 3, 8, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 24,
abandoning 60; absent 8; 25, 59, 81, 165
ambivalently loved 24; analytic 106, object relations theory: and concept of
122; bad 25, 59; captive 20; -cathexis ambivalence 29; definition of 11;
18, 22, 23, 140, 153; -choice 18, 22; Fairbairn 11, 51, 55–75; Freud
contemptible 31n; dead 7, 8, 31, 33; 11–33; 60; includes developmental
death of 22, 29–30; denigrating 31; axis 24; and instinct theory 144;
differentiated 47, 138–9; 153, 154, Isaacs 34–54; Klein 19n, 51, 58; in
156; disappointment by 25; ego- Loewald’s work 144; in “Mourning
identified-with-the- 20, 25, 62; and melancholia” 11–33; origins of
emotional life of 63–4; exciting 5, 11–33; as a revised model of the
25, 56, 61–4, 65–9, 71, 74; external 3, mind 32; the term 11, 51
9, 19n, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28–9, 32–3, 42, obscurities 98–9, 100, 101, 102, 107
47, 59, 60, 70–1, 73–4, 89, 91–2, 122, oedipal child: emotional state 159;
153; fixation to 7, 8, 22, 31; forsaken fantasy life of 159; need for unity
19, 20; give up 7, 30; identification 153; parent’s love for 161; and
with 19, 20; incestuous 138–9; parricide 153
152–5; internal 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, oedipal love: child’s 167; in the
19n, 20, 24–6, 28–9, 31–3, 35, 40, 47, countertransference 157–77;
195
Index
emotional state of 159; healthy 161; 154; reconceived 147–8;
parents’ 167; of patient and analyst re-conceptualized 138, 158; phallic
161–2; pre- 139; reciprocated 168; phase 139; renunciation of 167–8;
Searles’ own experience of 160 resolution of 150, 161; Searles 158,
“Oedipal love in the 166–8; “something rich and strange”
countertransference” 157–77 154; successfully analyzing 161; and
oedipal parents: “DNA” of 151; death superego 140, 148–50, 151, 153, 156,
of 145; desire of 138–140; 168; as tension between influence
identification with 149; libidinal and and originality 140–1; transformed
aggressive relationships with 152; 154; undifferentiated object relations
love of 167; metamorphic 154; universality of meaning of
internalization of 148–51, 156, 167; 50; unresolved 143; waning of
murder of 138–45, 147, 148, 152; 138–56, 168
sexual strivings toward 140; Oedipus myth 92, 139, 146–7
threatening and punitive 167; Ogden, T. 19n, 29, 32, 39, 50, 52, 62,
transferences to 152; transmutation 78, 80n, 102, 106, 115, 117, 118, 122,
of 150 139, 141, 154, 165, 175, 177
oedipal relations: atonement of 149–51, omnipotence 23, 28, 33
152; emotional world of 155; omnipotent phantasy 47, 48, 93–5
incestuous 153; internalized 149; omnipotent thinking 28, 33, 47, 48
restitution of 149 “On Narcissism: An Introduction”
Oedipus complex: and autonomy 152; 22–3
and atonement 156; castration, as originality: Breuer and Freud 140–1;
part of 140, 144, 156, 167; creating Loewald 138–56, 154; Plato 141;
ancestors 146n; definition of, versus influence 140–1
Loewald’s 142; demolished 142–3,
154–5; destruction of 140, 142, paranoid-schizoid position 45, 102
154–5; and ego 142, 149; parental authority 143, 144–5, 146,
emancipation, urge for 144–56; 147, 149
emotional confines of 154; Fairbairn parricide: atonement for 149–51, 152,
138; father in 139, 146; Freud 138, 155, 156; and autonomy 153, 155;
139–40, 142, 143, 148, 155–6, 166–7; fantasies of 14, 145; inability to
and “greater limiting reality” 168; commit 145; Loewald’s definition of
healthy 167; “heir” to 153, 168; 143–5; a loving murder 143–7;
incestuous component of 152, 156; necessary path 148–50; of oedipal
incestuous fantasies of 139, parents 144, 148, 152; revolt 144;
140; incestuous object relationship securing influence of parents 150;
153; internalization of oedipal object superego as documenting 149–50
relations 149, 150, 151, 153–4; Klein personality: of analyst 117, 128; of
138; Kohut 138; Lacan 138; Loewald infant 61–2; melancholic 24;
138–56; more than a repression non-psychotic parts of 45, 122, 125,
142–3; oedipal love 158–65; 129, 130, 135–6; neurotic core of
metamorphosis 151; murder of 154; and Oedipus complex 154;
parents 138–45, 147, 148, 149–50, organization 26, 80; psychotic core
152, 155, 167; negative 139; neurotic of 154; psychotic part of 45, 122,
core of 154; non–incestuous objects 134, 135–6; split off parts of 11–12;
152; positive 139; psychotic core of suborganizations of 52, 55, 60, 71;
196
Index
thinking aspect of 125, 130; 43–5; omnipotent 47, 48; role of 39;
uniqueness of 128 omnipotent 47; and phantasy 35, 39,
Phaedrus 141 40; product of internal objects 52;
phallic phase 139 promotes interest in external world
phantasy: activity of 35, 40; alpha 4, 50; reality principle 47–8; self–
function 46; Bion 46, 50; “builds a object differentiation 46, 47;
bridge from the inner world . . . to self-object undifferentiation 47;
the outer world” 4, 50; content 35; solving emotional problems 50–1;
definition of 35; epistemophilic “the subjective interpretation of
instinct 50, 51; external reality 4, 42, experience” 42–3, 47; transference
44, 47–50; Fairbairn 9, 51–2, 58; 40, 54; truth 51; unconscious
Freud 41; function of 4, 35, 50, 52, thinking 4, 35, 38–42, 44, 45, 46, 48,
54; instinct 45–6, 49–50, 52; internal 50–1, 52, 54; the verb 35, 40; see also
objects 9, 19n, 35, 47, 51–3; Isaacs phantasy
34–54; Klein 39, 41, 50, 51, 58; and Plato 141n, 143n
knowledge of reality 48–50; and The Portrait of a Lady 85
meaning 42–8, 54; and mental life 9, preconscious: conversation with
35, 45–6; mental mechanism 39; and unconscious 29, 88; and dreaming
the need to know 50–1; objective 14, 88; experience of hate 81; in
reality and 48; object relating Fairbairn’s internal object world 63;
mediated by 47; omnipotent pre-oedipal love 139
thinking 47, 48; “particular sorts primal phantasy 140
of . . .” 39; “phantasy thinking” 47; primary identification 153–4
primal 49, 140; psychic content 41, primary narcissism 22–3
44, 54; psychical reality 9, 51; psychic primitive emotional development:
development 45–8; “reality thinking” creating a way of being alive 78;
47; Rivière 39, 42–4; in self–object Winnicott 2, 76–96
differentiation 46, 47; “the subjective “Primitive emotional development” 2,
interpretation of experience” 42–3, 76 – 96
45, 47; subjective reality in 48; projective identification: Bion 38, 177;
symbolic function of 4, 44; symbolic Klein 39; mother-infant relationship
meaning 42–5; the term 41; as 38; Rosenfeld 38; Searles 177
transference 40, 54; transforming psyche-soma 90
sensory/bodily experience 46, 48; psychic development: and phantasy 45,
truth 50, 51, 54; “within the infant” 47; Fairbairn 55, 57
37–8; work of 34; unconscious psychic dynamism 61
psychic reality 9, 41–2, 44; psychical reality: conscious, in
unconscious self-reflection 42–5; tension with unconscious 42;
unconscious thinking 4, 35, 38–42, dream-like memory of 109; and
44, 45, 46, 48, 50–1, 52, 54; see also external reality 41–2, 44; and
phantasying phantasy 9, 51
phantasying: alpha function 46; psychic structures: relationships among
development of thinking 48; ego the 63
function 52, 53; epistemophilic psychoanalytic theory: see analytic
instinct 50–1; id function 53; theory
interplay of internal world and psychosis: evasion as hallmark of 28;
external reality 47–8; interpretive act fear of recognizing 121; of mania
197
Index
and melancholia 28; denial of 136; revolt 18
psychotic core: of personality 154 Rinsley, D.B. 56
psychotic field 100 Rivière, J.: conception of phantasy 39,
psychotic part of personality 45, 122, 43–4; definition of phantasy 42;
134, 135–6 Developments in Psychoanalysis 34;
Isaacs 39, 42
reading: act of 1, 85, 99, 100; being read Rosenfeld, H.: development of
by 2, 82; Bion 97–116; book about psychological life 38; Institute of
1; capacity for 49; creatively 1, 10; Psychoanalysis in London 56;
critical 87n; early Bion 98–100, 102, mother-infant relationship 38;
107, 108; experience in 1, 76, 84, 86, projective identification 38
88, 103, 104, 108, 143, 169;
experience of 1, 2, 3, 85, 88, 101, sadism 25
103, 104, 141, 163–4; Fairbairn Sandler, J.: dream-work 45;
55–75; Freud 7, 13, 24, 32; as understanding-work 45
interpreting 3; intransitive 2; Isaacs 4, São Paulo Seminar, No. 1 134–6
34–54; late Bion 103–8; learning Scharff, J.S. and Scharff, D.E. 56
from experience 99, 101; living “Schizoid factors in the personality” 56
experience in 103; Loewald 138–56; schizoid pathology 57
“Mourning and melancholia” 7, Scott, W.C.M. 46
24, 32; O of 103, 104; “Oedipal love Second Discussion Meeting 51, 53
in the countertransference” 157–77; Searles, H. Bion 158, 174–7; Chestnut
“Primitive emotional development”: Lodge 161; clinical theory 161, 164,
76–96; the reader 2; Searles 157–77; 174; conscious experience 169, 176;
style of 155; “transitive” 2; consciousness and the unconscious
“Unconscious identification” 173–4, 176–7; container-contained
157–77; “The waning of the 175–6; context transformed into
Oedipus complex” 138–56; content 158, 171, 172, 174, 175;
Winnicott 41, 76–96; versus countertransference love 158–68;
writing 1 dynamic unconscious 169; Freud
reality principle 44, 70 166–7; “greater limiting reality” 168;
regression: in analysis 85; defensive 24, language, use of 167; mother of 174;
25; to narcissistic identification 24; non-countertransference love 160;
from narcissistic object relatedness 24 oedipal love 158–68; “Oedipal love
rejecting object 5, 56, 61, 62–3, 65–6, in the countertransference” 157–68,
67, 69, 71 169; Oedipus complex 158, 161,
reparations 90 166–8; reading 1, 157–77; 164, 165,
repression: barrier 88; and ego 142; 167, 169, 176; schizophrenic
meaning of 142; “more than a . . .” patients 161, 162, 163, 164, 176,
142–3; of murderous impulses 144; 177; thinking, way of 157, 158,
and Oedipal parricide 144; of 167, 170. 173; transference–
Oedipus complex 142–3; of split-off countertransference 160, 161, 163,
parts of the self 71 169, 175–6; “turning experience
“Repression” 12 inside out” 158, 171–3, 175–6;
restitution 150–1, 152 unconscious communications 157;
reverie 103, 108, 112, 113, 114, unconscious experience 169, 176;
115, 177 “Unconscious identification” 157,
198
Index
158, 169–74; “waking up” to oneself thing-in-itself 44, 104
164; working, way of 157, 158, 167, thinking: as action 120; alpha function
170; writing, way of 10, 157, 159, 46, 102; analytic 19, 32, 35, 56, 90,
161, 163, 164, 165, 173 101, 130, 138, 166; breakdown of
Segal, H.: Institute of Psychoanalysis in 115; capacity for 47, 48, 51, 70, 103,
London 56; symbol formation 122, 125, 130, 132, 175; clinical 55,
proper 45; symbolic equation 45 169; development of 48; and
self: -acceptance 72–5; early experience dreaming 39–40, 46; endopsychic
of 78; interpreting aspect of 43; loss structure, as 70; incapacity for 121,
of 58; -object differentiation 46, 47, 133; as interpreting symbols 43; new
70; perceiving aspect of 43; form of 12; non-magical 47;
-reflection 42, 45; –regard 13, 14–15, omnipotent 28, 33, 47, 48;
16, 19; sense of 78–9 originality of 7; phantasy as 42, 47,
sensory/bodily experience: and 50, 51; psychotic 121; reality 47; a
language 49; and phantasy 46, 48, 49; space for 92; theory of 4, 35, 34–54;
sexual desire: mother as object of 139; transference as 40, 54; unconscious 4,
object-related 152; present from 35, 38–42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50–1, 52,
birth 14; triangulated 167 54; and thoughts 35, 54; in
sexual instinct 61, 139 Winnicott–Bion era 39–40; and
Sophocles 92 writing 9, 11, 27; yet to be
The Sound and the Fury 85 thought 32
Spitz, R.: infantile development 37 thoughts: arise from writing 11;
“squiggle games” 77 common property 6, 140;
Standard Edition of the Complete experience transformed into 120;
Psychological Works of Sigmund meaning of 54; repressed 142;
Freud 13 thinking one’s own 128, 175;
Steiner, J. 34 thinking, overwhelmed by 175;
Stoppard, T. 76–7 unconscious 39, 171; unthinkable
Strachey, J. 12, 13, 41 120, 175; verbally symbolized 120,
structural model 19, 35, 53, 102; 172; versus thinking 35, 54
replaced by Fairbairn 55; residue in Tinbergen, N. 43
Loewald 149 topographical model 102, 158, 177
Studies in Hysteria 6, 140–1 Tower, L.E. 158–9
sub-organizations of the personality 52, transference: agency of 74; as a clinical
55, 60, 71 theory 158; experiencing for first
superego: atonement 149–50, 152, time 41; more verb than noun 40; as
153; critical agency 60; documents phantasy 40, 54; as phantasying 40,
parricide 149; identification 140, 54; situation 40; way of thinking for
149; internal agency 156; the first time an emotional event
internalization 149, 151, 156, 167, 40, 41
168; internal object 52; introjection transference-countertransference:
149; metamorphosis 149; resolution aliveness and deadness of 32; and
of Oedipus Complex 150, 153; conscious and unconscious
split–off part of ego 19, 53, 60 emotional shifts in 175; impasses 26;
Sutherland, J.D. 56 love in 160, 161, 163–4, 168; oedipal
symbolic equation 45 176; oedipal love in 160–1, 168; role
Symington, N. 56 of 79; between reality and fantasy
199
Index
161; Searles on 157–77; truth, need sub-organizations of the self 53;
for in 176; understanding and thinking 4, 35, 38–42, 44, 45, 46, 48,
interpreting 157; Winnicott on 79 50–1, 52, 54; thoughts 39;
transitional incestuous object topographical model of 177
relationship 152–55, 156 “Unconscious identification” 157, 158,
transitional phenomena 91, 161 169–74
trauma theory 58 unintegration 9–10, 82–3, 84, 89
traumatic experience 56–7, 58
“the transference situation” 40 Vargos Llosa, M. 6
transmutation: atonement in 150; of
oedipal parents 150 waking: and dreaming 134
Tresan, D. 106 waking-life: child’s introduction to 88;
Trilling, L. 107 adult’s experience of 88n; dream and
triumph: and control and contempt 31; 135–6
dream of 74; Klein 31n; mania 26, “The waning of the Oedipus complex”
28; versus despair 28 138–56
truth: evading the 135; human need for Winnicott–Bion era: dreams in 39;
50, 158, 176; of one’s experience 50, Isaacs 40; of psychoanalysis 39;
54; and phantasying 50, 51; -seeking transition to 54; ways of thinking
51; “the” 104; of what is 106–7, 136 39–40
Winnicott, D.W.: aliveness and
“The unconscious” 12 deadness 31; analytic frame 81–2;
unconscious: communications 157; and analytic relationship 79; analytic
consciousness 173–4, 176–7; technique 83–4; analytic theory 31,
differentiation from conscious 102, 45, 55, 77, 79, 89–90; being alive 90;
134, 177; differentiation from “bits and pieces” 83–5, 89; “brakes”
preconscious 14, 29; dynamic 169; on fantasies, putting 48, 144;
endopsychic structures 60; fantasy “complications” 92; “coincidences”
79, 140, 159; incestuous wishes 14; 92–3, 94–5; creation versus discovery
internal object relations 13, 17, 19, 91; creativity 93; depression, theory
24, 25, 31, 60, 69; internal object of 79–81; dreams of children 87–8;
world 5, 28–9, 33, 71; Fairbairn’s external reality 93–4; Fairbairn 9, 56;
view of 55, 63; Freud’s view of 18, fantasy 93–4; “the fear of
41–2, 88, 177; identification 22, 80, breakdown” 4, 40–1; hallucination
157, 158, 169–74; Klein’s structure 89, 91, 93, 94; hate 81–2; illusion 91,
of 19n; mental activity 41; mental 92, 94–5; integration and
content 42; mental life 43, 45, 54; unintegration 9–10, 82–3, 84, 85, 89;
the O of the 115; object-loss 15; internal object world 31;
phantasy 35–54, 58; and interpretation 83–4; Isaacs 4, 9,
preconscious 88; psychic content 41, 38–41; language, use of 76, 79, 81,
54; psychic reality 8, 41–2, 44; 84–9, 87n, 90–2, 94; life and art 96;
psychological work 45, 120, 157, “live an experience together” 89–90,
175; repressed 14; self–reflection 42, 93; maternal provision 92;
45; split-off part of ego 17, 19, 25; “methodology” 78; mother 38, 78,
split-off parts of the personality 85, 89–95; mother-infant as single
11–12; symbolic functioning unit 38, 89–95; playfulness of 77–8,
44; structural model of 19; 82; primary maternal preoccupation
200
Index
153; “Primitive emotional transference-countertransference 79;
development” 2, 76–96; primitive transitional phenomena 91, 161;
love 3; psychological life, voice of 77–8; “Winnicott–Bion” era
development of 38, 90; reading 1, 2, 39–40, 54; word object 3; writing of
3, 41, 76–96; “squiggle games” 77; 2, 3, 9, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 84–9, 87n,
thinking of 9; transference 40; 90–2, 95–6
201

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Creative Readings

Thomas Ogden is internationally recognized as one of the most creative

Thomas H. Ogden is a supervising and personal analyst at the

The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association with

Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

TITLES IN THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings Jean-Michel

ISBN: 978-0-415-69832-0 (hbk)

1 Some thoughts on how to read this book 1

2 Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” and the

3 Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised

4 Why read Fairbairn? 55

5 Winnicott’s “Primitive emotional development” 76

7 Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical seminars 117

8 Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived 138

9 Harold Searles’ “Oedipal love in the

I would like to thank the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for

A new reading of the origins of object-relations theory. International

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly has kindly granted permission to use the

I would like to thank Marta Schneider Brody for her perceptive

This volume is the product of more than a decade of writing my

The experience of reading

When I am talking about a book that is important to me, I often slip

reading – more accurately, this aspect of reading – as “transitive

It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his fingers or

In reading this sentence, there is sadness and beauty to the language,

Reading as interpreting: Adding something new

With the exception of Isaacs, all of the analysts whose work I

It seems to me that a libidinal tie to an internal object toward

In this passage, I am extending Fairbairn’s thinking about internal

his introduction to the theoretical section of Studies on Hysteria

When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were

Borges, in the preface to his first volume of poetry, Fervor to Buenos

If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other,

What one says and the way one says it

truths must again and again be rediscovered in new forms, otherwise

Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring

The writing is dense – a great deal of thinking is occurring in the very

declaring the object to be dead.” Mourning does so by “offering the

To study Freud’s writing is to study his thinking, and to study his

All impulses, all feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in

I cannot refrain from voicing the opinion that the explanatory

Who but Winnicott could have refused to adopt either Isaacs’ or

An example of unintegration phenomena is provided by the very

Who but Searles could have invented a style of writing that is as

while we [he and his hospitalized schizophrenic patient] were

Who but Bion could have introduced a set of revolutionary

And, who but Loewald could have written a sentence as profound

If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of

Perhaps the most important measure of the worth of this volume is

the personality. This line of thought has played a major role in

Freud made use of this seemingly focal exploration of these two

The disturbance of self-regard

Freud’s unique voice resounds in the opening sentence of “Mourning

Dreams having served us as the prototype in normal life of narcis-

The voice we hear in Freud’s writing is remarkably constant through

prior to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside

This [lack of awareness on the part of the melancholic of what he