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In a recent online lecture on “The Wounded Healer”, Jungian analyst Penelope Tarasuk noted that one of the first questions she often asks her analysands early in treatment is, “How has your heart been broken? What I mean by that is, how have you been disappointed by another human being or your sense of the Divine?” She emphasizes that this question does not arise from wondering “if” but rather “how” each patient comes heartbroken to analysis, and that psychic process involves the healing of wounds and the causing of wounds. However, there are some analysands who arrive without the initial capacity to engage with this question; they suffer from the wound of “being” at all, wished from the beginning not to exist. Their presenting problem—like the initial situation of a dream—is annihilation. Such is the analysand's condition in this challenging case, offered with candour, courage and vulnerability by the presenting analyst. In the case of “Kate”, the analyst describes her experience—and ongoing fear—of being annihilated by her patient, “taking the transference” (Mitrani, 2014) by opening herself to the archetypal affects, bodily sensations, emotions and images of her patient and the analytic field. Given Kate's developmental history of negation and neglect, a strong analytic vessel is needed—and tested—from the start, as she enters the consulting room with what Bromberg (2011) p. 180 refers to as “annihilation dread”, and Eigen (2011) describes as “the dread of trauma hitting if one dares to begin”, as “to be hit by trauma as one begins to form can turn beginnings into signals of trauma. One fears to begin (development, creative work, love) lest disaster comes” (p. 19).
As the analyst wrestles with the often ineffable, paralyzing intensity of her patient's material, she affirms Kate's right to exist, the inherent worth of her being. Along the way, their arduous path makes great demands upon the analyst, invoked in the alchemical language of being in Kate's “fiery prese