ABSTRACT
As Britton has pointed out, the complicated entanglement between love, hate, and knowledge creates enormous psychological difficulties for patients. If the analyst does not acknowledge the patient’s internal experience with knowledge and attempts to interpretively assist them with these overwhelming phantasies, analytic contact may become jeopardized. As a way to preserve analytic contact, the patient’s various phantasies and pathological defensive cycles that surround that psychic stance are consistently examined and interpreted. Unfortunately, the brush with psychic reality and the momentary experience of self-knowledge that K demonstrated in that tenth session created another reaction and retreat. Knowledge was the key element in T’s transference, with either a masochistic or passive-aggressive and sadistic stance. The projective identification process creates a healthy cycle of learning and accepting new knowledge about the self and the object.
