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This is a week that presents us with a very interesting problem about analysis, the one that arises from Richard's father becoming ill. It produces a very different response from the time when his mother was ill, which threw him into something of a panic and an attempt to split and idealize in a very frantic way. Richard's father's illness occurred dramatically and it seems that Richard found him collapsed, presumably from a heart attack or some aspect of heart disease. It came after the Monday session which had the fascinating material about Mr and Mrs Bluebottle and Richard's savage attack on the moth, following which he became very persecuted. He was very anxious when Mrs Klein referred to it as a beetle instead of a moth and all this was in the context of his fear of thunderstorms.
That session was very dominated by the prospect of Richard's father, who had been staying in X, going away again, and it was still, as the previous week had been, under the sway of the Oedipus Complex, although at a more pregenital level than Mrs Klein was inclined to think. However, when his father then became ill, Richard developed a psychotic depressive state in miniature. Its manifestation was focused on his knife, the same knife with which he had attacked the moth. It now became virtually a suicidal instrument. He put it in his mouth, he hit his teeth with it, he pointed it at himself and Mrs Klein was worried enough to warn him of the danger.
This seems to be a very important analytical problem that has to do with questions of omipotence. Analysis functions not only to bring up infantile problems from the depths but also to stir and intensify them. If, when infantile problems are stirred up in this way, they then encounter fortuitous events in the outside world which set up a terrible reverberation, the potentiation of omnipotence can give rise to very dangerous