Introduction to Part One

Several of the themes that were to become central in Joseph's work are evident to some extent even in her earliest papers. In an unpublished paper of 1953, for example, she stresses the importance of observing what the patient does in the transference as well as attending to what he says. In the two papers reprinted here, ‘An aspect of the repetition compulsion’ (1959) and ‘Some characteristics of the psychopathic personality’ (1960), she introduces the theme of equilibrium, balance, and the patient's need to maintain it even when he or she consciously wants to change.

In the first paper reprinted here Joseph is concerned with those patients who experience themselves as being passively and repetitively subjected to unpleasant treatment at the hands of others. She suggests that this passivity often in fact involves a very active deployment of defence mechanisms, primarily to protect the patient from overpowering anxieties linked with the experience of dependence. The patient she describes presented as a woman who needed no one, though everyone, she said, liked and needed her. She complained that she could not love anyone because they would let her down. She had very little feeling, positive or negative, about analysis or her analyst, though she gave her analyst the impression that she wanted her to think that she was different from other patients, more insightful, more accommodating, more helpful. Gradually it emerged in the sessions that the patient was splitting off the needy aspects of herself and projecting them into other people around her, including her analyst. Simultaneously she idealized the good aspects of her analyst and other important people in her life, had taken these aspects into herself unconsciously, and had become identified with them. She was

them, and she had no awareness of the origin of the idealized qualities she felt herself to possess. Projective and introjective identification were thus being used simultaneously to avoid dependence and to