ABSTRACT

In the course of an analysis, profound psychic transformations evolve as psychic regret is consciously confronted. This involves the opening up of depressive position capacities for viewing things increasingly from another's subjective perspective, for differentiating that perspective from one's own, and for facing one's insatiable hungers, referred to as "greed" by Klein (1957). The case to be offered illustrates how psychic regret made conscious can lead to growth in self-agency and self-reflection, to an awareness of yearnings for intimacy, to an awareness of psychic and interpersonal space, as well as to the awareness of the phenomenal aliveness in "just being together". Other insights into an awareness of one's own needs and motivations arising through regret involve awareness of one's own grandiosity, and of one's sense of missing something within that is revealed to be an early connection with the primal other: the pre-Oedipal mother. Cognitive capacities for differentiation are enlarged as self-reflection is expanded through the grief-laden insights that come with regret. In this way, defensive distancing from both internal and external object relations connections can be retraced to the past in terms of a repetition of early disruption in object relations bonding with the mother. The past and present can be sorted out. There is also 124a new growth in a capacity for containment of instinctual impulses, as well as for compassion for the other, and a sustaining of a more full whole object capacity to love.