ABSTRACT
Bion’s extensive work with a young borderline female demonstrated how the analyst dealt with trying emotional assaults and verbal devaluation—as she also instigated his own profound disturbance in the countertransference. His interpretative explanations were unsatisfactory and did not offset these grueling experiences of sensory overload. After a turbulent session, he realized hours later that he had remained preoccupied with her as he listened semi-attentively to other patients.
He later on added in more disturbing aspects of her experience—as she had been demoralized by two previously failed analyses. Bion fell prey to ‘hearsay’ evidence from her family. Both the analyst and patient began quarreling about her need to interrupt the session to go to the lavatory. She resented his psychologizing her need to do so, being made ‘problematic’ and leaving her feeling violently blamed and misrelated to.
In the 1990s, other London Kleinians have taken up interpretations that are more tolerable to borderline states of mind. The complementarity of Bion’s own notions of the analyst’s model of the patient’s mind, the patient’s model of her own mind is now augmented by Steiner’s (1994) idea of the patient’s model of the analyst’s mind. In other words, with ideas such as the ‘analyst-centered interpretation,’ the analyst focuses on how the patient makes sense in a defensive way of how the analyst’s mind operates (as opposed to what feels like the analyst’s intrusive interpretations about the inner doings of his/her own mind).
