ABSTRACT
Man's capacity to acknowledge the finiteness of his existence, and to act in accordance with this painful discovery, may well be his greatest psychological achievement, despite the fact that it can often be demonstrated that a manifest acceptance of transience may go hand in hand with covert denials. H. Kohut describes two types of self-object: an idealised parental imago and a grandiose mirror self. An idealised parental imago allows the child to experience a sense of fusion with the idealised parental object, calm and grandiose. Patients often experience the anxiety of the loss of self in the form of a fear of physically going to pieces and getting lost in space. Fragments of the non-integrated self are related to the experiences of bodily functioning by the primitive mind. Antonella came to analysis with an ordinary state of unhappiness, which she had not felt necessary up to that point to acknowledge as an element worthy of asking for help and change.
