ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author finds that when certain analysands establish crucial states of being in the transference they often do this by living through a mood. He focuses on the clinical situation and restrict myself to a study of those moods that are characterological – those that are repeated forms of being states. The author calls that experience-memory stored in the internal world a 'conservative object'. A conservative object frequently serves an important function in analysis when it preserves a self state that prevailed in the child's life just at the moment when the child felt he had lost contact with the parents. A malignant mood, from a functional point of view, would be one, however, that is primarily aimed at some Other. Moods are complex self states that may establish a mnemic environment in which the individual re-experiences and re-creates former infant-child experiences and states of being.
