Chapter 7. Her Lost Background: The Undifferentiated Sea of Inner Body Awareness

The next question which occupied my mind was how to justify my change of technique in terms of psycho-analytic theory. As I have said, I felt more and more that I had not acquired adequate mental tools for understanding much of what was going on, or for knowing how to deal with it when I did understand; in fact, there was a kind of split in myself, between the aspects of the analytic experience with her that I felt I could usefully organize and therefore talk about in terms of the concepts that I had acquired during my training, and areas of my own experience that I had not yet discovered how to link up with the accepted hypotheses of psycho-analysis. So when, in the first years, she constantly told me what a fool I was, I did not think it was wise to put this down only to neurotic resistance to the interpretations I was trying to give her.

There was one particular theoretical preoccupation at the back of my mind when I began working with her that was linked to recognized psycho-analytic theory, since, as I have said, in 1944 I had published my first psycho-analytic paper and its sequel in 1945. In both of these I had been concerned to try and clarify in my own mind the concept of ‘the internal bad mother’ and relate it to the concepts of the nature of fantasy as put forward in general psychology. I had been particularly concerned with the problem of internal perception and with a statement by Freud:

Internal perceptions yield sensations of processes arising in the most diverse and certainly also in the deepest strata of the mental apparatus. Very little is known about these sensations and feelings; the best examples we have of them are still those belonging to the pleasure—pain series. They are more elementary than perceptions arising externally and they can come into being even when consciousness is clouded … these sensations are multi-locular, like external perceptions; they may come from different places simultaneously and may thus have different or even opposite