Soldering Abyss: The Intersubjective Roots of the Sense of the Void. Rereading Clinical Case Reported by Winnicott

ABSTRACT

In this article, the author proposes rereading Winnicott’s clinical case concerning a woman whose sense of loss became a way of integrating her self experience by obliterating her tie to the object and attaching herself to a void. The author extends Winnicott’s ideas on this phenomenon by proposing an intersubjective view of the origins of the obliteration of the object and the roots of the sense of the void in the psyche. Sometimes, a mother, to psychologically survive, must neglect her child. A child unconsciously surrenders to his/her mother’s need to neglect him by obliterating his love for her. Therefore, the obliteration and the void are cocreated states in which the child participates. He abandons his love for her, emptying himself, and perpetuates the emptiness in order not to put a demand in an effort to care for his mother’s psychological safety. These intersubjective dynamics are clinically discussed in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a young woman who was unable to grieve.

This article is referred to by:

“And in that Dream, I Have Another Dream”

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Notes on contributors

Yaakov Roitman

Yaakov Roitman, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, and supervisor, he has a private practice in Rehovot, Israel.