ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, in the analysis of women by women, one might be confronted by a melancholic core in the relationship to a frightening, internal, maternal imago that has not been elaborated. These analyses powerfully evoke the relationship to the somatic. The internalization of the body of the mother, which is a requirement in the development of a woman, can take on frightening, fragmented qualities. One of the hypotheses derived from women is that a same gender therapeutic relationship might be an aid in the re-enactment of aspects of an early relationship between mother and infant. In the British Society, the understanding of the countertransference has become the main area of work from which the understanding of feeling states in the analytic session is derived. In the analytic process, aspects of the internal world, parts of the internal self-representation, are projected onto the analyst and reenacted in the transference.
