ABSTRACT
‘Putting the boot in’ has a resonance for finishing off the helpless opponent. This chapter explores the use of a particular kind of violence that is brought into operation in certain patients when they experience a psychic situation which brings to awareness feelings of depressive guilt and anxiety. Hanna Segal has made the distinction between depressive pain and guilt as a persecution, as opposed to the quality of depressive pain which can be experienced as sadness, longing and regret. The defence against depressive anxiety which is expressed as violence against an object is also an outcome of a disturbance in the capacity to perceive an object as separate from the self. The powerful tyranny over the object seemed to obliterate the possibility of any enquiry into the state of the object, or of any interest in it, or even knowledge of it, and so served as a powerful defence against depressive anxiety.
