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A part of writing is overcoming the difficulty of writing. This is perhaps always true, but it is even more so now, as the coronavirus reality thickens and spreads, its sinister shadow ever more present. The world is sick, I think to myself. The exhortations to not return to normal seem right, that facing what normal has been is to realize the spell we have all been under, of course to varying degrees, for as long as I can remember. And yet this leaves us suspended, up in the air, without points of orientation: we can't know when, how, where.
We are without some of our usual external supports, those markers of identity that come from without and help shape what's within.
In my own psychoanalytic work, a concept that is useful to me is that of the good internal object. For Melanie Klein, the good internal object is hard won through facing our hatred and wishes to do harm to those we love. The good object inside is different from idealization, though it requires idealization early on to establish itself. Idealization works to keep out of awareness destructive urges and feelings, the persecutory anxieties and fantasies that interfere with the establishment of the good internal object early on. If we get to the point of being able to recognize that the object we need is also the object we wish in fantasy to destroy, if that object can tolerate our hatred, without too much vengeance or collapse, we have a chance of having inside something like a good object that is sustaining, that can provide a point of orientation.
The other day I was consulting (on Zoom, of course) with a group of candidates. One of them presented some work I will discuss here.
The candidate described her patient, who, like many patients, is having difficulty making the transition to working in this new mode. A., a woman in her early thirties, began the first session of the week saying,