In These Pages …

How do we semantically signify the nuanced forms of psychic distress? Each of the usual suspects—anxiety, depression, boredom, alienation, fear—must inevitably inflect distress according to the reader's idiosyncratic constructions, our theoretical profundities notwithstanding. We open the pages of this Journal with the first of a two-part exploration by Marilyn Charles of a signifier that seems to us amply descriptive and deserving election to more common usage yet that has received comparatively little attention in the psychoanalytic literature: emptiness.

Although Charles contends that men and women experience emptiness somewhat differently, regardless of gender the sense of being empty or full proceeds from the nourishment provided by an early environment that was experienced as empty or full. Furthermore, if early containment was poor, the later emergence of self will be damaged and a kind of leaking away of selfhood will occur. With it, the sense of possessing intrinsic meaningfulness remains undeveloped and its antithesis, emptiness, will result. Charles follows and develops Klein's view that emptiness may arise from excessive projective activity during infancy, preempting a capacity for feeling emotions of all kinds, even anxiety, and emerging broadly as a schizoid characterologic defense formation.

For a woman, a complex resonance exists between psychic emptiness and the knowledge that one possesses a physiological space, an emptiness, to be filled presumptively by phallus or fetus. For the male, according to Charles, matters are roughly reciprocal: Emptiness is feminizing and castrating—with the consequence that the sense of inner emptiness may be masked by external displays of competence. The phallus that would penetrate an emptiness may, itself, be empty.

Through theory and case presentation woven together in a rich, evocative prose, Charles develops specifically in the present paper the image of emptiness in the woman. Despite her assertions that women expe