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"I CAN IMAGINE AN INFANT", I sometimes feel it necessary to say, "held to two ample milky breasts—yet starving out of the pain of losing either, by choosing the one."
That this remark does not go down well (at least at first) can easily be imagined. The individuals to whom I make it feel deprived, empty. The idea of abundance is decidedly my own. Indeed my remark seems to them only to validate their experience: Is a comment like that supposed to help?
And yet, I feel persuaded that it does—that a long time ago, as now in the transference, there was a greed so great as to fail securely to metamorphose into appetite. Had it done so, such satisfactions as are available to the appetites might have consoled even compensated for the loss of the "other" breast. But in failing to give over into appetite, the greed, in its very nature insatiable and unsatisfiable, left a sequence of consequences that the analysis has somehow to put right.
In what follows I shall attempt to describe these consequences and the matter of helping put them right. But in doing so I shall be venturing onto the treacherous shoals of originology on which psychoanalysis so often founders.
In the consulting room a remark such as mine about the infant and the breasts can be taken either (or both) as metaphor or construction of historical experience. Its validity is moot; only its usefulness matters. If I say it, for example, to someone who is obsessing whether this or whether that is the case, I am doing so to refract the disappointment the patient would feel were either the case and the fear he would feel if neither were the case—as if an