You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sir,
Having had the honour to be the discussant for Dr Herzog at Santiago (see Levinson, 2000), I am sending you a few of my reflections.
Dr Herzog's paper was about a child who ‘suffered mental abuse’ (Herzog, 2000). The abuse consisted in an inversion of the normal flow of projective identifications. The worried, suffering parents weren't able to provide their son with their mental power to accept and transform his anxieties. They didn't help metabolise his basic fears, and particularly they hadn't passed on to him a method of dealing with feelings and emotions. Indeed they did the opposite. They used the child to evacuate in him their own anxieties across the generation gap.
There is another story here. That of the analytic encounter, which has to bring in everything (so that, as Natalia would say, it can all be told). It has to come alive, and especially must be transformed—not only known but, I repeat,