ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how seemingly inaccessible patients can be helped to feel less immobilized by fears of spilling and dissolving. Insights about these fears have been culled from work with psychogenic autistic children. The reaction to this threat was to 'seize up' and to stop doing anything. Jean's enjoyment of life and of her undoubted capacities was continually being halted by this fear of spilling away and losing herself. Jean's fears have much in common with those of Sylvia Plath, who was the first wife of Ted Hughes. Focusing on the function of the skin in early psychological development, Dr Biven, a psychoanalyst from Ann Arbor, Michigan, has studied the poems and writings of Sylvia Plath, as well as Alvarez's biography of her, in order to get in touch with her struggles to preserve her 'entirety' against the floods of feelings which threatened to submerge her.
