ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the technical challenge of working with a borderline patient who displayed verbally aggressive behaviour in the consulting room and presented violent phantasies. She indicates that her patient alternated between a state of mind where he experienced the analyst as a reflective, dangerous object that he needed to eliminate and his need to preserve her alive for sadistic attack. In this formulation one can perceive the influence of the works. The book demonstrates how focusing on the intense affective experience of narcissistic anxiety, using analyst-centred interpretations or recognising the informative experience as described in the second session, seems to be more mutative than the interpretation of the manifest attack on the analyst in the first session.
