The impasse reached in the treatment of such cases can sometimes be overcome if the analyst accuses himself of traits attributable to the pathological introject. For example, when the author said of herself: 'I am dumb and crazy', she became, for the moment, the objectified mother imago. This patient had a psychotic mother who had been introjected, but the patient had been unable to 'establish contact' with that introject until the analyst enacted the role as described. The rigid neurotic equilibrium was thereby upset, and the patient was enabled to establish a much more useful relationship with the therapist: hostility directed by the patient against the unhealthy ego nucleus was externalized and directed against the analyst in an entirely new fashion.