ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how certain manic defensive organisations can be used to sustain a very fragile sense of self and enable a potentially psychotic eruption to remain in a latent state. It discusses the psychoanalyst’s experience of working analytically with a nine-year-old girl, Victoria, examines the ways in which she tries to master persecutory anxieties, crippling phobias, and potential fragmentation in order to hold herself together. The chapter shows how she tries to convince herself and others that she can function like an ordinary normal child when psychically she is all the time balancing precariously on a tightrope of mania. It highlights some of the technical problems psychoanalyst needed to consider when working with such a patient. The pychoanalyst’s patient, however, attempted to hold on to her "normality", albeit relentlessly on a tightrope of mania, and was desperate enough to begin to face her own internal nightmares and her struggle with her reality.
