ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between mental void and borderline personalities. In the human being, perinatal linking symbiosis is the matrix at the basis of psychosexual development, which leads to the differentiated structuring of the psyche. From the psychodynamic viewpoint, mental void is the hiatus occurring in the psyche between the symbiotic background and the human being’s narcissistic structure. The structural mental void corresponds to what happens in just one portion split off from totality of the mind. The interruption of a neurotic patient’s associative flow within the psychoanalytic process led Freud to theoretically conceptualize resistance. Freud’s theory, as well as the contributions of some of his followers, exclusively describe the vicissitudes of the mind’s “contents”, the unconscious, preconscious, or conscious representation of thing, inner object fantasy, identifications in the ego and the superego, and so on. “Engulfment” is a binding structure that Bion, described and typified to explain the constitution and assembly of what he called “bizarre objects”.
