Response to ‘Report from Borderland‘

‘K’ s powerful and moving account of his personal experience of analysis is a generous gift to the analytic profession. It raises a number of crucial questions and challenges some of the basic assumptions of analytic theory and practice in a way which gives us a rare opportunity for a more public dialogue between analysts and analysands than is usually possible. In this paper, ‘K’ does not question the commitment or competence of his previous analysts, but rather, the analytic method itself when it is applied to those, like himself, whose sense of self cannot, at least to begin with, bear the insight which analysis brings. He vividly highlights the danger that premature insight ‘may all too readily— because of the fragility of the sense of self and of identity—be experienced as a pain laid on pain, and if it continues, a terrible and sundering process of loss’ (p. 24), leading inevitably to a ‘s low motion, hypnagogic (my only recourse was to watch it from the outside) disintegration’ (p. 22). He describes the way in which even the lightest interpretation may ‘inadvertently be taking away a whole world’ (p. 25).

Sometimes people in analysis describe this kind of feeling as one of falling for ever or of a black hole at the centre of their being. Many analysts have recognized this phenomenon and that its roots lie in the experience in infancy of extreme failures of parental attunement and reflective function. From a developmental perspective, these descriptions reflect the activation of infantile experiences of being related to as a self-object, not as a subject. Bion (1962) described this as ‘nameless dread’, Ogden (1989) as an intense anxiety deriving from the autistic-contiguous condition. Stern (1985) described the acute aloneness which comes from this experience and suggests that it reflects cumulative failures of containment at several crucial stages in the infant's development of self-in-relationship—those of core, intersubjective and verbal relatedness.

The char