ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that while M. Balint's work on the basic fault has limitations, he does make a unique and valuable contribution to the understanding of the internal structure of a range of borderline psychotic transferences. Through this understanding, analysts can direct their interpretative work to the appropriate developmental level. From a basis in Balint's work, the chapter explores how best to help patients in analysis regressed to the level of the basic fault. It presents clinical material to illustrate the author's view that the essential pre-verbal remembering and repeating in the transference reproduces traumatic failure or rupture of the earliest state of merger with the object, which incorporates within it a failure of containment of the trauma. Finally, the chapter looks at the difficulties for patient and analyst locked in the undifferentiated world of projected parts of the self, and an indeterminate identity where part lives in the analyst and part in the patient.
