ABSTRACT
Analysts recognize the aspect of living death in many of their analysands: those who have succumbed to symbiosis and persecution, real and imagined, during their development; those who have served as trash cans of parental projective identifications of all that the parents hate in themselves. The technical ideal that developed out of Freud's papers on technique and all the later advances in ego psychology or structural theory required of us analysts and therapists strict neutrality in our dealing with analysands. Neutrality would be manifested in maintaining a position that Anna Freud (1936) described as equidistant from all parties to the conflicts under consideration. Consequently, the experienced analyst will develop an ever greater capacity for a suspension of attitude, a hovering, a delay of responsiveness and understanding, and a tolerance for long periods of ambiguity and undecidability in counter-transference as well as the transference. All of which demonstrates a capacity for self-containment as well as containment of the analysand's projective identifications.
