ABSTRACT
Tustin's and Grotstein's "black holes" and Winnicott's radical late ideas about unthinkable early breakdown and madness describe the catastrophic nature of early infantile traumatizations. This chapter explores how they found powerful expression and intersected in the analysis of a severely perverse patient. Through a detailed clinical illustration of this difficult analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient, perversion is understood as the pervert's last-ditch attempt to halt the fall into an abyss of core breakdown. This black hole experience in the interpersonal psychic space is caused by the impact of a psychically "dead" parent, particularly the impact of the psychically "dead mother" and her deadening world of blank bereavement, depression, and deadness on her child. In those depths of unthinkable agony of early breakdown or madness are buried both the traumatic past and a "basic urge" to experience it.
