ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine why it is so hard to bear uncertainty and considers manifestations in the transference connected with uncertainty. Uncertainty may threaten to overwhelm the ego, to summon up the earliest persecutory anxieties, so that even apparently relatively minor uncertainties may be experienced as matters of 'life and death'. The chapter shows how some patients create situations in their lives, and in the transference relationship, in which others are exposed to excessive doubt and uncertainty. The patients describe sometimes project states of mind connected with uncertainty as a communication, and sometimes as a part of a more cruel, hateful and vengeful process. But since these patients so quickly become the torturers, they are uncertain about who inflicts the torture – they themselves or a 'bad' internal or external object. The chapter indicates that the analyst and the analysis itself are then, by a process of projective identification, allied with sadism, repeatedly subjected to uncertainty.
