ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the emotional strain the analyst is put under when working with the psychotic patient. The ability to hate, alongside loving, means that ambivalence has been reached. The analyst working with the psychotic must be prepared to receive the full power of the projections from the patient. These projections will need to be contained by the analyst and “stored”, and to achieve this, the analyst must be analysed and able to analyse the hate existing inside. The “coincident love–hate” in the psychotic patient “implies that there was an environmental failure at the time of the first object-finding instinctual impulses”. Although the whole of Donald W. Winnicott’s work on the technique of psychoanalysis is linked with what is now considered the analyst’s countertransference, Winnicott rarely uses it as a term, and in this paper he refers to it in the sense of an abnormality or a sign of the analyst needing more analysis.
