Power Cut in the Countertransference

This paper is an attempt to describe and understand a certain type of defence that I shall call a ‘power cut’ because of its crippling and anti-relational nature. I will take extracts from a baby observation to show how this type of defence can be adopted from the beginning of life, followed by vignettes from my work with a young child and an adult patient which addresses the particular kind of difficulty the analyst has to face with patients who resort to such a defence. I am arguing that while defending from another, the patient is able to destabilize not only the connection between himself and this other, the analyst, but also that between the analyst and the analyst's internal world. I understand this as the violent re-enactment of the patient's uncontained and split off primitive experience. I see recovery from ‘power cuts’ as the main challenge for the analyst who is helping the patient to recover from an early failure in containment which has led to defective splitting. Only when the unthinkable experience of ‘power cut’ can become an experience that can be lived through and converted into a deintegrate, may integration be achieved.