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In this paper Elizabeth Gee unfolds her thinking on abortive processes in analysis. Written in a voice and style consonant with a wider psychotherapeutic narrative, the core of the paper contains case material hauntingly illustrative of barely viable analysands and their struggle both for—and against—relationship. She proposes a link between clinical abortions and impasse in her work with four female patients. Increasingly ‘intrigued’ by what these patients share in common—all attended frequently over many years, but seemed to make no psychological progress—Gee discovers each has a history of undisclosed abortions. She uses this information in conjunction with her countertransference to hypothesize an archetypal ‘abortion mechanism’ which when activated by early damage produces an abortive attitude, a pathological preference for the destructive over the developing. This functions in analysis to abort the possibility of relationship. It attacks the analytic pairing, the self and the body of the patient.
Gee grounds her archetypal claim in the fact that spontaneous abortions are a universal filter; only the viable survive. This ‘seemingly physical mechanism has a psychic dimension’ she says. For, ‘in order to live rather than just exist in psychic terms, we have to be able to negotiate numerous symbolic deaths followed by creative surges’ (pp. 21-2). That is to say, the tension of opposites has to be tolerated ‘in order to be able to let go when we wish to hold on’ (p. 22). However, a pathological attitude towards creativity can develop, which leads to patients aborting what would usually be viable. This ‘abortive attitude’ derives from a combination of the archetypal abortion mechanism and an environmental component of a damaging early experience. Thus, in some patients, something created is immediately destroyed, while others hold on to something negative, so that creative potential is aborted as part of an attack: Gee gives the example of patients holding on to ange