ABSTRACT
In the ®rst paper in his book Psychotic States, Rosenfeld writes of a patient that her `central anxiety was a fantasy of the persecuting analyst forcing himself into her to control her and rob her, not only of her inner possessions, for instance, her babies and her feelings, but her very self (1947: 22). Persecutory anxieties about an invading analyst, following on the patient's phantasies of intrusion, is a theme that runs through Rosenfeld's pioneering papers of the forties, ®fties and sixties. He describes the whole syndrome: the infantile anxiety and greed that impels the intrusion, the new identity the patient obtains by this type of projective identi®cation, which carries with it fears of ego-disintegration in addition to anxieties of being trapped in and confused with the object, and how, in order to keep the analyst out, the patient does not speak about events that might arouse interest, withdraws and negates interpretations. If these things are now not new, it is because Rosenfeld, foremost among others, made them familiar.
