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The aim of this presentation is to discuss the relation between an internal object unfit to contain early projective identifications and hallucinatory phenomena, aggression, and paranoia in the case of Sergio, an eight-year-old boy. Studying the analytic process of this child will enable us not only to construe how such an object may come into existence in one's internal world, but also to visualize the development in the transference of a more functional containing object and its structure. I shall also discuss the specificity of Bion's concept of “containment,” which differs from Winnicott's holding, Bick's skin object, and Anzieu's skin ego.
Upon re-working the case material at some depth, it became clear to me, as I hope to convey to the reader, that for an internal object to be fit to perform its true containing function, it needs to be the combined breast/penis object. In it, the penis is regarded as the detoxifier while the breast is actually the invaginated recipient of the baby's anxiety-laden projective identifications. For this object to be called into existence in the internal world, the actual mother must have reached the Oedipal stage to the degree that she conceives of the father as a third object in her relationship to her own mother.
I met Sergio at the beginning of 1996, when his parents brought him for an assessment. Both parents, who had been separated under the worst terms for the previous five years, suffered from severe pathology with a kind of “War of the Roses” going on between them. Sergio had twin brothers, aged 20. His own birth coincided with the terminal illness of his maternal grandfather, who died when Sergio was three months old. At that same time, his mother underwent a tonsillectomy, forcing him to be weaned. Then, when he was 15 months old, his mother suffered a severe depression that led her to seek psychoanalytic treatment.