ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a specifically female type of transference, in which merging with the object is utilised as a means of avoiding aggression. The tendency of many women to merge with their objects appears alongside their intense guilt concerning their aggressive feelings. In actuality, matricide is the single psychic event guaranteed to bind us forever to the mother, in a way which is at once insidious, invasive, and without hope of resolution. The chapter proposes to concentrate on the difficulties associated with living with this ambivalence, and the various ways in which women attempt to resolve it or avoid it within the transference. The idealising transference was a necessary and inevitable means of creating this split between good and bad objects. The chapter examines a type of merger transference: the domination of the object by the self, which demands that the object be the same as the self.
