ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the case of Marie who laments that “there is nothing inside.” The author understands this in two ways: as a veridical statement reflecting a psychic deficit or as the phenomenal experience resulting from a complex defensive process. The author addresses the binary dilemma that Marie struggles with: a tension that places her absence of healthy concordant identifications derived from her relationships with her mother alongside an absence of healthy complementary identifications derived from her relationship with her father. Emphasized in this chapter are the communications from the embodied self, deadened and then revived in the context of relationship conflict and desire.
