ABSTRACT
When I was a candidate in psychoanalytic training, one of my supervisors made a passing comment that has remained with me as a faint, yet reverberating echo. She said of the patient we were discussing: ``She lacks an absolutely necessary ruthlessness.'' This necessary ruthlessness, as I understood my supervisor then and am using the term now, is the ability to inattend and dissociate extremely anxiety-provoking stimuli ± stimuli that, when integrated into one's ongoing sense of self, are detrimental to one's psychological functioning. These are the stimuli which, unblocked by ``necessary'' dissociative defenses, cause us to experience a chaotic over-¯owing of unsymbolized affect ± what Sullivan (1953) called ``uncanny emotions.'' I hypothesize, therefore, that ruthlessness is necessary in the maintenance of one's ongoing, continuous experience of oneself in the world. In this chapter, I delineate some of the essential ingredients of a culture of ruthlessness and go on to explore the maintenance of necessary ruthlessness in three analytic patients. I approach the issue with the assumption that the ability to maintain necessary ruthlessness exists along a continuum from total ruthlessness (i.e., complete indifference to the plight of others) to the total breakdown, over time, of the ability to maintain this necessary defensive barrier. My three cases explore different points on this continuum. One will also be used to examine the possibility that we can, if we explore our own ruthlessness, ®nd a constructive balance point.
