ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the case of a late adolescent boy who became almost completely silent for four months within the first year of analysis. In early psychoanalytic papers on the topic, much of the language gives the impression that analysts felt under attack when patients fell silent, and that they had to "confront" the resistance. The two-person psychology pertains to what Balint termed the basic fault, referred to by others as the pre-Oedipal or pre-verbal period of development. Patients who suffer with deficits related to the basic fault feel as if they are broken, psychologically fragile, and as if something were missing. The feeling states don't lend themselves to verbal expression because the assault or damage to the infant occurred in the pre-verbal years. Willingness and desire to Know the patient has nothing to do with Love, and certainly nothing to do with Hate.
