Chapter 4. The Dream of Water Behind the House: Need for a Self-Created Environment

As I have said, during the early years I had tried using what she had said about her acute depression at the farm when going out in the broken milk-float as a basis for interpreting her feelings of the impossibility of restoring a so-damaged mother, both a fantasy internal mother or part of mother damaged in anger, hate, and greediness, as well as her so-inadequate external mother.1 But gradually I came to feel my way towards the idea that there was another, perhaps deeper and more primitive source of depression than the one based on the feeling of inability to preserve what one loves from one's anger and attacks, whether made in reality or in fantasy. I began to see that in the many sessions in which it would emerge, after angry silence, that she was too depressed to speak, there seemed to be a state of utter emptiness, depletion, and hopelessness, no drive to do anything at all. Previously I had thought of this and interpreted it in terms of her identifying herself with the idea of a mother's breast that she felt had been totally depleted by her greediness and which could never be refilled; although she did not reject such interpretations, I had no evidence that they led to any psychic movement. But then I began to wonder whether such interpretations were not referring to a fantasy elaboration of something which, in fact, existed independently of fantasy, a state of failure of instinctual impulse and the drives of desire that was connected with a reality sense of the utter hopelessness, in her childhood, of ever achieving a true mutual give-and-take relationship with either her mother or her father.