What If We're Not That Bad? On Learning to Metabolize the Dead Mother/Dead Self

Danny, a patient I saw in a four-times-weekly analysis for ten years, puts me in mind of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. In the play, two men, Vladimir and Estragon (also called Didi and Gogo), wait for a character we never meet. On a barren road, near a leafless tree, Didi and Gogo engage in solipsistic conversations that lead to dead ends. Neither are certain if they've met Godot, if they're waiting in the right place, if this is the right day, or whether Godot will ever materialize. In their world, nothing changes, nothing is certain, and there's never anything to do. Danny, too, waits. His internal object world is replete with barren roads and leafless trees; he is trapped in “dead end” conversations about why he cannot change. So, Danny waits. But, whom or what is Danny waiting for? One answer is that he is waiting for someone to notice that he is waiting. Another is that Danny is waiting for someone willing to “be with” him and help him understand the nothingness, deadness, and badness that have come to define his existence.

Though our patients may not articulate this as such, what they often seek help with are painful aspects of their experience that have yet to be represented, known, and thought about. Much of the help we offer them occurs in the realm of unconscious communication, gathered and understood over time throughout an analysis. The following is an account of my work with Danny, a man whose passivity and psychic paralysis produced more discomfort and dis-ease in me than I could bear. In retrospect, I can now see that my efforts to manage this discomfort resulted in me cultivating a “shelter in place” state of mind from which I treated him as though he were a carrier of a deadly disease much like COVID-19. Drawing on theories of Green and Fairbairn, I will offer an account of what Danny needed us to make sense of. I will describe aspects of his treatment with a focus on my countertransference in which I responded to his disturbing unconsci