ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how Paula Heimann’s understanding of the phenomena of countertransference and the importance of an analyst using his emotional or affective response as a tool to elucidate a patient’s material helped the author to understand a particularly difficult clinical phenomenon: a patient’s unconscious need to maintain his belief in “bad parents”. These parents appear to have provided such inadequate emotional conditions for their children to grow up in that the child’s capacity for healthy object relationships seems permanently impaired. In some such cases, the damage seems beyond the capacity of analysis to rectify. Segal distinguishes between pathological and normal repression. Any mechanism of adaptation can become pathological when it is not “phase-adequate”. When anxieties of psychotic intensity motivate these mechanisms of adaptation and defence, rigid structurization and compartmentalization may occur within the ego.
