ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a theme that there is no ending without a beginning. It illustrates the problem of interminability with a patient with whom what it is to have an emotional experience cannot be taken for granted, and also that the problem of interminability is one of how to begin. It then discusses the tantalising mother, which emerged gradually as a result of collaborative work, that suggests a construction, a hypothetical moment in which the patient initiated and instituted the reification of experience, which, henceforth, became his main mode of psychic being. The image of the tantalising mother condensed the maddening emotional experience that could not be lived because it led to murder, yet it was re-enacted within the mode of reification. The chapter ends with the clinical vignettes from the analysis of three patients.
