ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the idea of both patient and analyst analytically surviving and living-through the patient’s internal world of deadness and destructiveness, and primarily the analyst’s experiencing and surviving the deadness and the destructiveness of the analysis. In Israel, as a result of the Holocaust and numerous wars, many analyses and psychotherapies involve people who grew up with psychically dead extinguished parents. There are many “dead” mothers who for a while, around the time of birth, felt that there was a breakthrough and a victory over death, but soon afterwards sank again into an abyss of depression, blankness, and deadness. Under the impact of the mother’s emotional and psychic deadness and overwhelming feelings of blankness and emptiness, the child forms a desperate, intense need to revive the mother and himself. A black hole is the set of events caused by the massive collapse of a dying star.
