ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on a group of patients who appear to show excessive concern for their objects. She focuses on the precocious concern, which simultaneously includes real concern and wishes for reparation together with a manic, spurious concern. The author shows the processes in her work with two patients. They present different pictures. The author encountered the patterns in consultations, for example a patient who, in an initial consultation interview, was uncertain about taking time off from the care of her children to have analysis. She stresses the process of an appropriation of concerned aspects of the objects, together with an intensification of vengeful hatred related to feelings of deprivation. The patients triumph over both their objects and needy parts of the self, and attempt to engage the analyst in enactments either as the harsh superego who strips the patient of all goodness, or as the participant 'sharer' of a very special relationship between mother and daughter.
