ABSTRACT
At various moments within the psychoanalytic relationship, the thoughts of the analyst and analysand become interwoven, giving rise to joint thought based on the triple foundation of free association-free-floating attention-latent thought. The particularity of the psychoanalytic encounter is not just that it is a unique and novel experience that is never renewable again as such, but that it takes place in a space that is, for both partners, out of the ordinary. The chapter points out that, for patients whose analysis appears to be going well, in that their mental functioning reveals a capacity for secondarized symbolisation with regard to the total object, certain malignant regressions can occur that awaken forms of violence, aggressiveness, and destructiveness associated with identity defence mechanisms. The psychoanalytic situation then becomes the place of attacks against the psychoanalytic relationship by an internal object that hates, and is envious of, the containing and integrating capacity.
