ABSTRACT
This Chapter explores the search of an adolescent girl for a good object and her struggle to preserve her sanity. Her experience of early deprivation and the subsequent trauma of sexual abuse had left her very fragile. As her external circumstances changed she was faced with the threat of psychic disintegration. This paper concentrates on the first two years of therapy when the patient, after beginning to overcome these experiences of disintegration, had to resist the attempt by perverse and psychotic parts of the personality to dominate the self. The clinical material illustrates how her sense of abandonment affected the nature and intensity of the transference relationship.
