ABSTRACT
Establishing an identity is a central and usually very troubling task for all adolescents: discovering who one is, finding a mind of one's owns—an internal analogue to the room that Virginia Woolf designates as essential not only to the capacity to create, but to the possibility of "living in the presence of reality". A mind of his own was what he—then a university college student in his first year—most needed and wanted. When he started treatment he was locked in an entrenched and protracted adolescent state of mind from which he seemed unable to emerge. The capacity to "hold" or "contain" the baby's states of mind is dependent, as we have seen, on the mother being able to be continent and cognisant of her own mental states, neither intruding them into her infant nor presenting an unreceptive surface to the infant's projections and need to communicate.
