ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the effect on the analyst of containing and carrying the patient's poisonous projections. The importance of the analyst's capacity to imagine the patient imagining, so that growth may be facilitated is discussed in connection with the effect on the infant's psyche, when the mother may have been unable to imagine her infant imagining. The chapter describes two patients who have experienced mothers who were unable to contain their infant's need to imagine, which led to the infant identifying with and internalizing the mother's inner conflicts. The two patients are Ned and Sarah. Ned and Sarah used bodily symptoms to express emotions and feelings to communicate something they had no words for. Analysis enabled them to begin to transform somatic doing into psychological feeling, and to embark on the journey towards symbolization. Analysts try to mediate an ever-growing capacity for symbolic experience which involves the emergence of both symbol and language.
