Dear Sirs,

I appreciate Emad Bishara's kind response to my article. My attempt to extricate myself from the kind of splitting that such acts of destruction as my patient's suicide give rise to has required me to hold polarized states, such as the arc of envy/generosity, in dynamic tension with each other. Yes, there was definitely her envious attack on creativity, generativity, and generosity—mine and hers—but I think there was also, in an albeit twisted way, an attempted act of love—to free both her son and me from her destructiveness, to give her mother a child with