ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how psychoanalysts make use of Melanie Kleinian ways of thinking, although the pervading influence of Wilfred Bion is evident throughout his writing. It presents examples of the type of patient who specifically cannot tolerate that negativity, the type of patient for whom 'nothing' - or 'the no-thing' - is intolerable. The chapter draws several illustrative strands together to give a picture of the situation faced by both the patient and the analyst. In Kleinian terms, it is a version of projective identification when the object takes on valued but troublesome aspects of attributes of the self. In the Darwinian scheme of things, some flourish, some falter. Choosiness is built into the system, such that the fittest display characteristics that assure them advantage in sending their genes into the generational gene pool.
