ABSTRACT
J. Steiner notes that the total defensive organization that the patient uses to manage their internal experiences will be relived within the transference. Steiner states that some patients use projective identification in an excessive manner to aggressively hand over their very identity, power, uniqueness, or autonomy. The patients explored in this chapter and illustrated by some cases show a desire for greater self-expression and separation from the object but also show a great reluctance to experiment with any true form of autonomy, separation, or growth. The leading edge of the patient’s anxiety regarding where they locate the thrust of their depressive phantasies is the other guidepost on how to interpret. In patients who are operating in this more fragmented depressive phantasy, internal experiences of separation or difference are felt as a loss of parts of the self, hence the resulting annihilation anxiety.
