Attachment, Abandonment, Murder

1 I would like to thank Jessica Benjamin and Steven Kuchuck for their contributions to this article. As always, my appreciation to Issy Gershon for his thoughtful translation.

Abstract

Alma phoned me, introduced herself, and started crying. She said that she had been referred to me because a terrible thing had happened. As I would later learn, we were about to deal with a wordless breakdown; a patient preoccupied with an object's “death” and her own destructive power. Using a relational perspective, this article will address concepts of separation and loss related to insecure attachment. We will focus on the emotional engulfment and anxiety associated with abandonment and loss as they arise in the therapeutic relationship. Fantasies related to the destructive power of need will be explored, including the fantasy of weaning from the object as from drugs, food, or alcohol, the confusion between murder and abandonment—the former stemming not from hatred but rather from love—and this confusion as expressed in the therapeutic dyad. The article concludes with the patient's response to her case presentation.

Keywords:

• Abandonment
• separation
• murder
• reunion
• attachment
• weaning
• reparation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Galit Atlas-Koch

Galit Atlas-Koch, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst, licensed creative arts therapist, and a clinical supervisor in private practice in Manhattan. She is on the faculty and a board member of the Institute for Expressive Analysis (IEA), serves as an editorial consultant for Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and is the author of several psychoanalytic articles on postmodernism and gender and sexuality. She is a former psychology columnist for SBC publishing house, Israel.