ABSTRACT
X has feelings of persecution about various sensory impressions he receives. Are all these sense impressions indications of a process of mental digestion? When he hears banging, is it because he has to get into a state of mind appropriate to being in a mother’s inside to spy on her digestive processes—a kind of sexual intercourse in which she (I, in the analysis) is digesting him by banging him to bits, clicking (his frequent complaint) him to bits, just turning him not into a person but a conglomeration of bits of faeces, a stool? In this case his attempt to get into the analyst is identical emotionally with getting ‘deeply’ into parental sexual intercourse—digestion of one parent by the other. (‘Deeply’ here means multi-dimensionally extreme—in space, in time, in ‘thoroughness’, in emotional involvement. A mathematical symbol is required for this concept, or something similarly exact yet abstract.) He has to see the supposed parental intercourse in minute detail and to the bitter end. But as he proceeds, he loses touch with his ‘base’.
