Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the idea that human experience is the product of the dialectical interplay of three modes of generating experience: the depressive, the paranoid-schizoid, and the autistic-contiguous. It provides a discussion of early experience of a different sort: the beginnings of the analytic experience. The analyst must allow himself to be freshly surprised by the ideas and phenomena that he takes most for granted. The book aims to re-approach the initial analytic meeting as if for the first time. It reviews the initial face-to-face analytic meeting as not simply a preparation for the analysis, but as the actual beginning of the analysis. The book discusses a specific form of primitive anxiety: the unconscious fear of not knowing. What the individual is not able to know is what he feels – and therefore who, if anyone, he is.