26 September 1959. Cogitations

The patient's relationship is, tenuously, with the analyst as analyst; it is predominantly with the couple in the room – any couple, but most obviously the couple formed by the analyst and himself; it is with himself only in a somewhat peculiar manner in that he is either identified with himself or with the couple.

The relationship is not so much with the couple as with the couple as two objects linked together. The predominant element in the relationship between the patient and the couple is that aspect of the relationship which is formed with the link between the two objects. The most obvious link is that provided by his free associations and the analyst's interpretations.

The link changes in character. For my immediate purpose we may suppose that the analyst feels called upon to give a sexual interpretation. He may say, in response to previous material and in accordance with psychoanalytic principles, “You are showing that you feel I am a man doing something sexual to a woman”. This statement turns the relationship between analyst and patient into a sexual relationship, and the verbal exchange has become a sexual link.

The patient does not subject this interpretation to α except tenuously and in non-psychotic aspects (parts) of his personality, but of that I do not wish just now to speak. Instead he subjects it to splitting attacks that are destructive in intent; it is taken in only to be subjected to splitting and ejection.

For this purpose mechanisms exist to carry out the double function. The splitting is carried out by some part of the psyche which is symbolically or pictorially represented by teeth, typewriter (working in reverse as it were – the words are taken in aurally, broken up into letters of the alphabet, and thus not only fragmented but transformed from sound into visual objects and ejected through the eyes to become further mutilated, so that they are now minute, unrecognizable shapes at a distance), gramophone (also working in reverse), and so on. The