ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the work of a young woman called Nina who had great difficulty in thinking about her emotional experience. The damaged and damaging aspects of Nina had to be experienced and understood within the analytic relationship before the symbolizing function could be restored. Nina's pain related to a feeling that, in some very basic way she was unsure of her place in the world and primarily, unsure of her place in mother's mind. The chapter reviews theoretical contributions in the following three areas: Freudian, Kleinian and Jungian. It presents aspects of the clinical work which link with this theoretical discussion. The dreams from her holiday showed the establishing of a container that could generate dream thoughts and an observer that can experience and think about them. Nina was beginning to see herself as identified with the dreamer who dreams the dreams and no longer with an internal object characterized by its habitual and callous destruction of links.
