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In the analysis of women by women analysts, one may be confronted by a melancholic core in the relationship to an internal maternal imago. The attachment to this primary love object may be preserved in a melancholic, invisible way and reach representation only in the après-coup of the analytic process. It is my suggestion that attacks on the body that take place in the course of such an analysis are expressions of the attacks on this primary object at the same time as this object is preserved in oneself.
These analyses bring to the fore intense somatic experiences that tend to be expressed in fragmented, part-object terms, so that what emerges in the analysis are bodily parts, such as the breasts, the uterus, ovaries and anus (see Cournut-Janin, 1998a, 1998b). The process of bodily fragmentation that takes place makes it difficult at times to recognize whether one is dealing with a hysterical presentation or with melancholia. The differentiation will be brought out in the analyst’s countertransference, as this chapter demonstrates, so that the issue at stake is experienced by the analyst not in terms of a battle between love and hate but, more accurately, in terms of life and death. The experience is that the very life of the patient may be under threat.
The pre-oedipal relationship to the mother was a later discovery in Freud’s work. He referred to the archaic relationship of the little girl to her mother as a “dark continent”, difficult to access in
analysis because it belongs to the pre-verbal, sensorial domain,1 he hoped that women analysts would be more able to shed light on these processes. Freud nevertheless identified the little girl’s sexual longings towards the mother and the wish to give her a baby.
Julia Kristeva has suggested a psychosomatic fatigue present in the woman that expresses her inability “to choose the sex of her object of desire, because she has failed to work through her bisexuality” (2012, p. 115). Women are in the impossible p