ABSTRACT
I have suggested that empathic ruptures and the capacity to repair them are ubiquitous features of intimate relationships – whether between mothers and babies, romantic or spousal partners, or therapists and their patients. In this chapter I shall develop this idea, and in particular look at the relationship between mentalising and the capacity for rupture repair. I illustrate this with a detailed description of a psychotherapy session with a borderline patient, and how efforts at restoration of a ruptured alliance were initially thwarted but, in the end, rewarded. A discussion of the psychoanalytic notion of reparation follows.
