ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how a patient strove to protect herself from the pain of object loss by rearranging her perception of reality–and often analyst’s own–in order to maintain her internal attachment to a pathological object relationship. It describes some of the shifts that occurred in the sessions, reflecting the patient's slowly increasing capacity to face pain and the awareness of loss. Since the most pernicious factor in developmental disturbances is the blurring of primary splitting between good and bad–that is, envy–it follows that a defence against envy would have to include undiminished impermeable idealisation. From the beginning, patient’s material was strikingly narcissistic–a running commentary on her "feelings", in a vacuum, with almost no content. Melancholia is a narcissistic condition; at base, the hatred of the object in melancholia is because of its separateness from the self, but this situation is complicated by other feelings.
