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Enormous difficulties face the analysts of those adults who have experienced significant maltreatment or abuse during childhood. They frequently present with rigid and fixed behaviour patterns which can create apparently insurmountable obstacles to change. In this paper we hope to explore the nature of this powerful resistance, in the light of some recent additions to psychoanalytic theory, from our own and increasingly from other groups, concerning the importance of a ‘theory of mind’, or more generally the capacity to mentalize.
The physical sense of self arises out of the infant's encounters with the world of physical objects in the first weeks of life; a sense of oneself as a mental or psychological entity arises far later and only through interactions with objects which share the unique human capacity for self reflection. In a previous paper (Fonagy, 1992), we proposed that the strength of the child's bond to the object was a function of the degree to which he experienced her as an accurate observer and interpreter of his mental state. We proposed that the infant's bond to the object was a residue of an intersubjective state when the infant and the caregiver's mental contents are not yet represented as clearly separate in the child's mind. Intersubjectivity will be predictably achieved to the extent that the caregiver has the capacity to reflect on the child's mental state (Fonagy et al., 1991) - by which we mean to mirror it at the same time as sending reassuring signals to the infant that mental states which he experiences as unmanageable have been registered and are coped with (or, to use Bion's term, contained, (Bion, 1959)). The infant's bond to the caregiver is, in one sense, a restoration of the mental union when the child sought himself in his object. Physical separation from the object becomes possible once the child's psychological self is a robust entity. The unity with the object is maintained via the affectional tie, the bond of love. If