ABSTRACT
It is the “good enough mother” at the beginning of life who is the pliable medium par excellence for her baby. When the quality has been absent, it is for the object-analyst to provide it, thereby permitting the subject to experience, alternating between fusion and defusion, the process of separation and differentiation that did not take place at the time. It is a foundational experience of illusion (total control over the object which is both outside and a part of the subject) followed by progressive disillusionment, which does not require the subject to adapt to the object and external reality in a forced and immature way in order to survive. The concept of pliable medium helps the analyst to free herself from unconscious demands that led her to want to be a perfect analyst, that is, quite the contrary of a good enough object, and to disarm the patient's anti-processual negativity.
