ABSTRACT
The ninth chapter pursues the implications further in contemporary report of restorative regression (Grossmark, 2012). The patient, who feels he does not exist, relies on a war chest of erotic and sadistic behaviors to ward off a profound and empty sense of despair. He can be aloof, insightful, needy, rejecting, appreciative, desperately excited and so on. The analyst is forbidden, however, to interpret his mood or even to request that he attend his sessions, rather, than, say, calling in impromptu from the car or the shower. The analyst suggests that the patient has regressed to a primary state of mother–infant relating. The difficult behavior, it is thought, reflect an infantile demand for total attunement. I attempt to demonstrate, by contrast, that the behavior, like the obsessional symptoms in the previous chapter, require a lifespan interpretation. It reflects an erotized identification with a dominant mother rolled into a sadistic identification with an abusive step-father and subsequently cultivated through the actual domination of men in fetish clubs. The image of the patient as a neonate appears in the relational matrix. It helps the analyst to endure the patient’s needy demands and softens his guilty countertransference frustration.
