Impasse: Dead Souls

Abstract

This paper chronicles my struggles with holding onto a contemplative attitude and sustaining the intersubjective space in the face of relentless arrogance and contempt in my work with a patient, who refused to acknowledge any perspective but his and who persistently rejected my reflections and interpretations. I will describe the deterioration of my ability to be the receptacle for the bits and pieces of his destructive mental contents and the painful process of recognizing my own unwitting complicity in the concomitant sadomasochistic power struggle. I will present my perhaps controversial limit setting to the verbal assault in an effort to reconnect to my reflective capacities and reestablish the analytic space, and thus protect the continuity of the treatment. I will examine this process from the perspective of object usage and Ogden's (2016) rereading of Winnicott's (1971) seminal paper, in which he states that the object is, in fact, injured by the subject's destructiveness. The destructiveness and its survival or lack thereof does not take place in the world of fantasied objects but actual ones: mother/analyst is wounded and may or may not survive the destruction. Moreover, for the mother to become a real external object for the infant, the infant has to recognize the destruction he caused and the psychological work involved in surviving the destruction.

Keywords:

• Impasse
• destruction
• damage
• limits
• survival

Acknowledgments:

I wish to thank Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. and the members of her study group as well as Jay Greenberg, Ph.D., Susan Obrecht, LCSW, and Janet Tintner, Psy.D. for their invaluable contributions to developing and revising this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Veronica Csillag

Bio: Veronica Csillag is the Co-Director, a Faculty member and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is the author of several psychoanalytic papers. She is in private practice in New York City.