ABSTRACT
Individuals with an emotional anchor and a sense of self can view others as separate and different. But, if a person has no sense of personal value, inner stability, or lasting internal identity, they desperately search for the elements in others. For the pre-psychotic or on the edge of psychosis patients, the motive seems to be one of controlling the analyst and discarding unwanted poisonous parts of self or object. The anxiety state is part of an internal collapse that is perpetuated by violent projective identification dynamics of demand and disappointment. If the patient is to mature and mourn the loss of control and love he demands in phantasy and projection, he must become his own container of acceptance and knowledge. Robert Waska has noted how primitive phantasies of dread, desire, loss, and demand within pathological cycles of projective identification leave some patients trapped in a very primitive and persecutory internal world of dead objects, broken promises, and unbearable loss.
