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Certain patients repeat the same unhappy experiences, apparently passively. The author suggests that this type of patient is dealing with intense anxieties related to dependency. He fears dependency because of the danger of intense aggressiveness, jealousy, and hatred of the needed object. The patient avoids the dependency by a specific combination of mechanisms: splitting, projective identification, and introjection. Joseph illustrates her thesis with two clinical examples. In one she describes a patient who had a series of love affairs—all of the men 'needed' her, but she was not really interested in any of them. After her marriage she was plagued by relatives who needed her; professional people whom she consulted, including the analyst, she experienced as needing her. She was unaware of her own need of others. She identified with her mother and projected her dependency onto others. The author states that with such patients 'their particular method of splitting and fusion with the idealized objects protects them from psychosis, but their inability to tolerate ambivalence, conflict and therefore integration obviates the possibility of normality'.