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The psychoanalysis of patients is based on the usage of free association. We are accustomed to reflect that when free association becomes difficult or stops, the patient has a resistance of some nature perhaps in the way of transference feelings, or particular anxieties related to content. On most occasions interpretive comments overcome the resistance after a varying period of time and free association once again proceeds. However, there are some instances where despite interpretations a seeming impasse is reached. The analyst makes a longer, more careful interpretation, then perhaps extra explanations or even attempts at sympathetic encouragement, all to no avail. The analyst and the patient become increasingly more enmeshed in a confused situation until often the analyst leaves the subject hoping to clarify the particular area at some later date. I believe that when this arises the analyst has come upon an area in the patient's psychic apparatus when the patient has by means of projective identification rid himself of as yet unknowable parts of himself into the analyst, who is acting as, in Bion's (1962) words, a container for these elements.
Ferenczi, in a congress paper (1933, ) first drew attention to what he described as a confusion of tongues between the adult and the child where tenderness has become guilt-laden. He says,
Children cannot do without tenderness [but] if more love of a different kind is forced on the child, then it may lead to pathological consequences. [He further elaborates that] the playful trespasses of the child are raised to serious reality only by the passionate often infuriated punitive sanctions. … If the shocks increase in number during the development of the child, the number and the various kinds of splits in the personality increase too, and soon it becomes extremely difficult to maintain contact without confusion with all the fragments, each of which behaves as a separate personality yet does not know of even the existence