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THE CENTRAL THEMES OF THIS PAPER ARE AN ADOLESCENT BOY'S tragic and chaotic life, dominated by object loss, the struggle against depressive affect, and the ways in which this struggle found form and direction under the sway of adolescent development. I shall present a chronological overview of the treatment, but shall not discuss the entire analysis. Rather, I shall confine myself to those periods of treatment and aspects of material that most vividly illustrate this boy's pathology.
The discussion will concentrate on two aspects of the patient's pathology. The first is the use, abuse, and meaning of skin. These persistent themes in the analysis are discussed in the context of the patient's childhood, and are compared to a primitive religious ritual in which skin was an important factor. Common to both this boy's fantasies and the religious ritual is the enveloping function of skin. The concept of envelopment illuminates a particular struggle and the efforts to resolve it through restitution by many violent means. The second part of the discussion focuses on these violent acts, in particular this boy's fantasy of a suicide pact—the violent "solution" that gives this paper its title.