ABSTRACT
I was first led to reflect on the topic discussed in this essay by a patient with an apparently empty, dead psyche. During the sessions he was inaccessible, absent. He hardly acknowledged my presence. I failed to find any interpretative means to make myself exist in his psyche,which would thereby allow me to accurately interpret his absence; the patient simply was not there to listen to me! My only function consisted in holding – in my countertransference – the anxiety of not understanding and not existing as an analyst in the patient’s psyche (but therefore being unable to modify his emptiness, his psychical death).
