The Pliable Medium

Introduced by Marion Milner (1955) in her article “The role of illusion in symbol formation”, translated into French for the Revue française de psychanalyse in 1979 (Milner, 1979), this concept was taken up and developed by René Roussillon in his book Paradoxes et situations limites en psychanalyse (1991). According to Roussillon, it is a “transitional object of the process of representation”, a bridge between internal reality and external reality, like the medium used by artists to give shape to objects in their internal world. It is particularly useful when the analyst finds himself at grips with the difficulties of a countertransference endangered by negativity.

For Roussillon, it presents five characteristics: it is indestructible, very sensitive, unconditionally available, indefinitely transformable and endowed with its own life (while being transformable, it remains itself). These characteristics are interdependent and they result in the capacity to transform quantitative variations into qualitative change, just as the material earth, if it is given a violent blow (quantitative), is transformed by being flattened out (qualitative).

It is the “good enough mother” at the beginning of life who is the pliable medium par excellence for her baby. When this quality has been absent, it is for the object-analyst to provide it, thereby permitting the subject to experience, alternating between fusion and defusion, the process of separation and differentiation that did not take place at the time. It is a foundational experience of illusion (total control over the object which is both outside and a part of the subject) followed by progressive disillusionment, which does not require the subject to adapt to the object and external reality in a forced and immature way in order to survive.

A young woman has been in analysis for several years. She is very involved in her sessions, but we are always on the verge of a negative therapeutic reaction, and, more generally, under the thr