ABSTRACT
"Internal homelessness" is a poetic term to designate something terrible. Not having direct access to their own experience as uniquely theirs means that our patients access it only through what it has in common with the experience of others. They can only have an experience of the object in terms of what makes it comparable or equivalent to objects of similar external attributes. This chapter describes how patients have to use objects or events in external reality to prevent the total loss of their externalized psychic reality. W. R. Bion described a psychotic man's use of objects in the room in an attempt to approach thought. What is new is the evidence of an unconscious logic at work in the use of such objects; they are organized in classes or sets according to formal similarities with the objects that are felt lost or destroyed as internal.
