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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
This paper reexamines material not uncommonly encountered in the analysis of severely ill patients, such as schizophrenics, borderline personality disorders, and those with mixed as well as narcissistic personality disorders. It deals with the emergence of an unendurable state often described as a sense of nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, or a “black hole,” a falling through space into a void. Previous discussions of this subject in the literature have emphasized the relationship of this material to an infantile catastrophe, a failure in the initial nursing couple with all that this implies for core psychosis or impaired ego functioning, or a faulty sense of self.
A 54-year-old married woman who I have been working with in analysis for many years was finally able to describe how she feels at her very core. When I first met this patient she was psychotic and unable to function at all. While in analysis previously for 4 years as a graduate student in the humanities department at a local university, she had broken down and so was unable to complete her Ph.D. thesis. The analyst had the unfortunate habit of falling asleep during her sessions, possibly