ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a psychobiographical example to illustrates how the D. W. Winnicottian dimension of transitional space, which corresponds to the internal world’s psychic space, becomes foreclosed in those who are arrested with severe character pathology, without the intervention of object relations psychoanalytic treatment. It presents several clinical vignettes to illustrate the contrast of how two patients who underwent an in-depth “developmental mourning” process in object relations psychoanalytic treatment were able to open up the transitional space in their lives, corresponding with the internal psychic space in their intrapsychic life. The chapter shows the tragic foreclosure of transitional space in the life of Virginia Woolf. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf writes, How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. Virginia Woolf was sexually abused at a very vulnerable age. Leonard Woolf is inexperienced sexually, and Virginia fails to have an orgasm, a failure that the Bloomsbury band blames on Virginia.
