ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the state of non-existence is, perhaps, the most painful of all states, and postulate that the self-destructive echoist will actively introject any object or life force available as a way of avoiding the pain of it. It aims to extrapolate further how the acknowledgment and experience of this in the clinical situation may be so unbearable for both patient and therapist, that evasion has ensued as a way of protecting them both. By 1970 H. Rosenfeld was applying W. R. Bion’s findings to his own work, observing how his patients, in operating powerful phantasies of parasitism, expected their analyst to function as the patient’s own mind. Rosenfeld’s patient clearly and accurately felt that he was sapping the life from his helper, who experienced him truly as an unrewarding and unalive “dead weight”. Rosenfeld then took this idea further and related it to what he termed “narcissistic conditions”.
