Reflections on Margaret Rubin’s Analysis of Saturated, Sexualized Horror

This discussion reflects on the internal object world of S, ravaged by erotized narcissism, emotional violence and neglect, and his desperate attempts to stay psychically alive in isolation from a very early age. He had too much and too little to bring to his analysis, having experienced brutalization in a part-object world of non-selves or non-persons, but his dreams seem to have acted as a lifeline, a halfway house between his inner experience of alienation and torture and the profound need to be seen if personhood were to ever develop. He could not think, but he could feel, albeit mostly in agony, and his dreams communicated this. Through careful attention to the countertransference, his analyst helps him to paint his own picture of the horror he endured. and, without intrusion or premature reaching for “improvement,” his analyst’s acceptance and growing understanding of who the soul-murdered child S might have been, allows him to glimpse and begin entry into a world of tender reciprocity around his existential nightmare. The analyst’s technique is a model of how to combine patience, tolerance of uncertainty and focus in the treatment of severe disturbance.