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First of all, I would like to thank our colleague for the generosity of sharing a clinical experience and providing me the opportunity to think about it.
The therapist introduces us to S., a middle-aged man who comes for consultation because he doesn't understand his feelings towards others, always highlighting
isolation and lack of contact. In his internal world's description, a ‘normal’ relationship with his mother appears to be one ‘in which there was no intimacy of any kind’. So far, the patient tells us about a failure of early emotional and intimate relationships, a process which would have been essential for his constitution and growth as a subject.
He lacks in his early experiences what Klein called ‘unconscious oneness’: ‘based on the unconscious of the mother and of the child being in close relation to each other. The infant's resultant feeling of being understood underlies the first and fundamental relation in his life—the relation to the mother’ (Klein, 1959, p. 248). Bion will add the containment experience and the container-contained relationship.
As we get to know the patient, a first clinical reflection is that this lack of intimacy prevents him from being nourished from emotional experiences and in turn feeding those experiences. On the contrary, he cannot reach, feel or understand emotions. He does not feel loved, understood, or contained by anyone and he cannot do it with others either. He thus lives an ‘extremely poorly’ existence, continually concerned with himself, concerned with the survival of his self, remaining distant and inaccessible, as stated by a pathological identification with the maternal object and the relationship with it. This internal impoverishment, with little symbolic function, also prevents him from developing a true dialogue with its internal and external objects; it prevents him from containing conflicts with objects and tolerating loneliness.
On the other hand, the patient tells us that the paternal relationship was domina