ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents a clinical account that shows the constant movement, in an analysis, from paranoid-schizoid to depressive anxieties and back again. She also shows how the patient moves to and fro between these anxieties, and how, in the transference, the analyst is heard or experienced in both cases. The author conveys the ways in which the patient experiences her analyst at different moments as, say, ideal, neglectful, tyrannically demanding and narcissistically corrupt, like the general stealing the treasures, someone who has hot water/acid thrown in her face, an ageing, dying grandmother, and so on. She points out that cruelty belonging to the patient, yet unacknowledged as part of her, joined with the cruelty of her father, to whom it was hard for her to turn for help. In the author's view, it is not only the patient who has to work through, again and again, from paranoid-schizoid reactions to a more 'depressive' position.
