ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes a clinical example to demonstrate the process of recovering lost impulses from infancy and deals with the overwhelming affect that is evoked in According to W. Bion, the boundary between self and other, between self and self, between conscious and unconscious is maintained by the contact barrier. When a life-threatening medical condition removes infants or young children from their mothers, there are a multitude of circumstances that impact the development of the contact barrier and create in the adult patient areas of psyche that are difficult to reach. Patients who are hard to reach due to early infantile or even conceivably prenatal trauma present some specific problems for therapists. Impulses themselves become associated with trauma, which moves the external trauma of the lost mother to an internal trauma of the lost self.
