ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author illustrates how she has integrated her understanding from infant observation with her clinical work. Infant observations suggest that impingements may occur for the mother– infant couple through the mother's failure to contain these primitive anxieties or through mother's intrusiveness upon the infant's experience, just as the analytic space and relationship are easily disturbed by the therapist's rigidity, defensiveness, or encroachment on the "Unknown". The failure to be held and contained within mother's mind is a traumatic impingement that involves the piercing of the psychic skin. It can lead to leakage of mental contents, inability to think symbolically, highly dissociated self-states, and a pervasive sense of unboundedness. Ms L suffers deep-seated fears of engulfment, invasion, and destructiveness. She has no sense of self. For her, there is no separation from the invading object, who is experienced as a foreign body in the mind—not part of the self, but confused with the self.
