ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic work continuously challenges the psychotherapist’s identity. Her sense of self must have a solid core, in order for her to be available and reliable for her patients, but must also be sufficiently flexible, so that it can be transformed and adapted in the encounter with patients who need to feel that they can fashion their objects. It is particularly trying to be the therapist of a psychotic patient—almost as if the analyst needs constantly to make up a new identity, to maintain a space for observation beyond the confusion. Psychotic expansion is an attempt to find an inner space that cannot be constructed, a locus where one can put and preserve one’s objects. Psychosis con cerns affects, thoughts, and ideas, which demand to be articulated and bound in an ever better-constructed form. These developments are particularly visible in the playing and the drawings of psychotic children.
