ABSTRACT
The "inner witness" is a mechanism that develops as a reaction to a reasonable experience of infantile helplessness and the maternal impingement that results from, it along with the presence of a sufficient experience of concrete or imaginary, that is internalised as an inner observer. The inner witness is not a specific internalised object, but rather a specific internal function, which is in charge of the unique shift between two psychic positions: the position of the victim and the position of the witness. If the inner witness is experienced as hostile, it will persecute the subject from within. But an absent witness condemns the subject to annihilation. The psychotic syntax that is generated by the absent inner witness points to the fact that the function of the inner witness serves both as a membrane that separates inside from outside and self from other—and as a barrier dividing between asymmetrical and symmetrical logic.
