In the Beginning There Was Darkness

* This paper is dedicated to Sarah.

Abstract

The author seeks to uncover a source for the emergence of an intersubjective relationship from work undertaken with a psychotic young woman, brilliant in solipsistic verbalizations and searing imagery, yet imprisoned in near-psychic annihilation. The analyst's unremitting dread of her patient contained the seed of their mutual transformation. Their passage across the void drove self-states within us both into dark regions from where, through their mutual absorption into the mysteries of the kabbalah, hope germinated. The patient's baseless universe, perverted and distorted by her parents' chronic mental illnesses allowed no mutuality. Beyond her immaculate attendance over 10 years, the analysis chronicled a malignant drive to destroy any possibility of a life organically growing toward an interpersonal and intrapsychic union. The analyst's predicament and the patient's unconscious drive toward health formed the dual force fields that uncovered roots, within both of them, of what the analyst names “the filaments of evil.” The analyst struggled, all the while unknowingly, to find a terrain where aesthetic and moral reciprocity could come into being.

Keywords:

• psychosis
• dread
• aesthetics
• morality
• self-states
• intersubjectivity
• transformation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nina Farhi

Nina Farhi is Former Director, The Squiggle Foundation, London; and is a Member, The Guild of Psychotherapists, London.