“Black Hole” Phenomena: Deficit or Defense? A Case Report

Grotstein (1990), following Tustin (1988), has recently described an important category of inner experience in psychotic states as “black hole” or “abyss” phenomena. He describes the experience as involving a “hapless or precipitous fall into endless space” combined with the “terror of nothingness and boundarilessness” (, p. 39). He cites Tustin's earlier conclusion that this experience is phenomenologically ubiquitous in psychotic states and that it represents the etiological factor of severe maternal deprivation or abandonment: “The ‘black hole’ emerges, in my experience, as a universal phenomenological image of the internal world of the psychotic and seems to represent the place where the mother used to be, but ripped herself away prematurely, leaving a ‘gaping hole’” (Tustin, 1988, cited in Grotstein, 1990, p. 43). Pursuing Tustin's idea of maternal deficit