The author explores two aspects of the analyst's effort to imagine the inner world of his patient and the way that they are manifest in the clinical moment. The first of these is the analyst's recognition and interpretation of his patient's elaborated fantasies. This current of the analyst's imagination is most often evoked by the patient's communication of whole-object transferences, which occurs largely in his verbal associations. The second is the analyst's reception and transformation of his patient's primitive emotional experience, a process that Bion has called containment. This second imaginative current is most often evoked by the patient's communication of part-object transferences, which occurs largely in affect and action. Interpretation and containment both go on at once in clinical work, although one or the other is usually dominant. Attention to the interplay of interpretation and containment in the clinical moment enables us to identify the articulation of whole- and part-object transferences and to integrate ego-psychological and Kleinian frames of reference in clinical work. In addition, the concept of mutual containment opens Kleinian theory to the possibility of a two-person psychology in which the roles of analyst and patient are more symmetrical than they are usually conceived to be within this frame of reference. The author presents two clinical examples to demonstrate the interplay of interpretation and containment. In the first, these processes operate smoothly. In the second, the process of containment is strained but ultimately successful.

This paper examines the empty states experienced by severely ill borderline patients. At times of stressful regression, these patients use complaints of emptiness to describe profound disturbances of affect, cognition, object relations, and bodily experience. Empty states may be seen as complex defensive configurations which protect a borderline level of psychic structure from the impact of aggressively charged object relations, and ward off further regression to states of fragmentation or fusion. Severely ill borderline patients consolidate an empty screen by means of a characteristic repertoire of primitive defenses consisting of various forms of projective identification, including bitriangulation and projective identification of psychic agencies, somatization, acting out, and specific alterations in cognition. The author describes the highly deviant organizations of the object world seen in empty states, and the complex and disturbing countertransferences which these states evoke.

The wish for revenge is a ubiquitous response to narcissistic injury, and particularly to the narcissistic injury that accompanies oedipal defeat. Vengeful fantasy serves to represent and manage rage and to restore the disrupted sense of self and internalized imagining audience that have resulted from injury. Clinical and literary examples demonstrate the split within the representation of the self and the imagining other that underlies the wish for revenge, and the way that this split operates differently in the psychic economy of the transiently and the chronically vengeful.

No abstract