“ … the way in which she does it is by crawling inside everybody and controlling them from inside”

This chapter is a discussion of the tortured ways of egocentricity. The struggle to come out of serious states of projective identification may at times put the analysand at odds with the experience of not knowing who one exactly is. This may, however, raise technical problems, some of which are shown and discussed below. The concept of reparation is brought to question. In Meltzer’s view, this is “… a misleading concept … You try to undo the damage you have done, where the only kind of undoing you can do is to take back your projective identifications so that they’re not left inside the father, or inside the analyst, controlling their lives.” The concept of reparation would therefore often seem to speak of omnipotence. The differentiation between excitement and true emotion is also stressed.