Considering The Heart of the Matter, as a phantasy elaboration of a depressive process, starting with an object-loss, the death of a child, and ending with a suicide, we have tried to formulate the metapsychological background of this process, mostly in Kleinian concepts.

Analysis of the given material reveals the following mechanisms: guilt-feelings which can be assumed as related to unconscious aggressive phantasies, an obsessional need for reparation coloured with a glimpse of manic omnipotence, splitting producing the keeping apart of a bad and an idealized object, the ultimate self-destruction to rescue the idealized object from the bad object.