ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates a more psychotic relationship to meanings, where the person’s thought linkages correspond to full blown symbolic equation. Emotional and psychological disturbance brings a narrowing of the space between symbol and symbolized, which is reflected in a narrowing of the space between patient and therapist. In the inappropriate meanings and false links forged, there occurs a total abolition of space between symbol and symbolized. The mode of meaning-making displayed by Jeremiah Solomon moves closer to the “inflationary increases of significances”, applied by Thomas Sass to schizoid and schizophrenic states. In the symbolic edifice on which Jeremiah leaned, there appear to be tinges both of more extreme schizophrenic conditions and of autistic thinking. If meaning-making and projection were originally lacking in this child, terror was not, as an account slowly emerged of his long captivity in a bottomless dark well.
