ABSTRACT
The "lullaby on the dark side", the unfolding nightly interactions and conversations between 6-year-old Noah and his mother, Sarah. Through an immersion in their experience we may come to grasp what it means to envision many developmental and analytic moments in light of these larger existential issues. Noah, the author's patient Sarah's 6-year-old son, became terrified to go to sleep. During the day he is passionately interested in all the dangerous and violent things he sees in the news insistently drawing his parents' attention to this side of daily world events more than they, like us, are comfortable focusing on so directly. In more analytic terms we can call it an annihilation anxiety that is an inherent part of the human condition. Hoffman coined the term "the dark side" for the aspects of the treatment relationship in which the analyst's needs inevitably clash with those of the patient realistically revoking, in part, "bad objects" from the past.
