ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some ideas by examining clinical situations in which patients struggled with new or old knowledge, largely unconscious, that pertained to themselves, their objects, or the relationship between the two. In situations of great anxiety, these patients ward off or destroy, through projection, any threatening self-object knowledge. The chapter focuses on the clinical manifestations of this struggle against knowledge and how analytic contact is maintained. Material from few cases will illustrate how certain patients appear determined to resist contact with both conscious and unconscious self-or-object knowledge and as a result they resisted analytic contact. They fled from both new, previously undiscovered knowledge and old, discarded and denied knowledge. The analyst is often the container for unwanted knowledge and must find an interpretive way to reintroduce those projected and rejected aspects of the patient’s mind.
