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In 1971, shortly before writing the ‘Two-Way Journey’ paper about D. W. Winnicott (see Chapter 16), I was supervising the analysis of a child patient. I found that the analyst concerned, Dr Lore Schacht, did not yet know Winnicott's paper ‘The Use of an Object’.1 When she read it she saw its relevance for the problems of the child we were battling with. Subsequently she sent me a paper called ‘Psycho-Analytic Facilitation into the “Subject-Loses-Subject” Phase of Maturation’.2 In this she wrote about one week of the analysis, quoting extensively from Winnicott's paper, but using the later version of it published in Playing and Reality.3
‘The events which prompted me to write this paper occurred during the five hours of one week of treatment of Jasper, a 41/2-year-old boy who had been in therapy about fourteen months. He had been taken on for treatment because he had shown himself to be extremely aggressive and physically destructive toward his environment (his mother in particular), had shown serious self-destructive tendencies, was unable to play with other children or alone, and was at the point of being dismissed from his nursery
Page 253school. During the first year of analysis, Jasper had lived through so rich an emotional development that I was constantly surprised by the insights into his psyche that he revealed to me.’
At one stage Jasper asked Dr Schacht to do something he did not like so that she could be punished by being put in jail. Dr Schacht writes:
‘While I was sitting in jail, Jasper came over to see what effect his actions against me had had. (“You should be dead by now; one dies in prison after some time.”)
The attacks on the object (me) increased in force in the following session when the car was pushed again and again against the wall, when the Mommy doll was again buried under the falling bricks, and when the Mommy doll finally fell off the wall and was lying dead on the ground. The rescue action, which might still have been possible, turned