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This week is a most astonishing one, rushed forward very much by the fact of Richard's mother being ill, first of all from eating salmon and later with a sore throat. The fact that she disappoints him by not coming to ‘X’ with him and not visiting him, keeps the tension up and drives the depressive aspects into the forefront of the material in a very premature way. In that sense it is rather a misleading week and in a way it also misled Mrs Klein into overestimating Richard's capacity for depressive feeling.
It seems fairly clear that the coincidence of this with the material of the previous week when he started doing the drawings of the starfish and the submarines, and thus the coincidence of the revelation of his internal attacks on his objects with the external situation of his mother falling ill and the canaries going bald, really seems to have caught him in a kind of emotional vice that pushed him deep into hopelessness. It can be seen as a little depressive illness from which Mrs Klein extricated him with her interpretive work and enabled him to have depressive anxieties instead. The circumstances surrounding the secret that he defaecated in his pants and the way in which it was connected with the bombings and torpedoings quite overwhelmed him. In at least three sessions of the week one sees him, at least part of the time, quite depressively ill, absolutely joyless, unable to take an interest, not wanting to talk, or play, or draw … not wanting to do anything. Mrs Klein does manage to pull him out of it very well.
The formulation, mainly centred on his jealousy, that, when he attacked the father's penis inside the mother as if it were a bad penis, he endangered his good object, the mother, undid Richard's pretence of protecting her from the tramp penis. This increased the fear that he would either destroy her or that his love for her would turn to hatred, as towards Germany, or that it would drive her into an alliance with the Hitler-father