Foreword to the first edition

It undoubtedly requires courage to present oneself with a book to one’s colleagues and to the widening public of followers of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis has now achieved such a depth and breadth of knowledge and concepts that it is difficult to keep up with all of the various Authors’ studies and papers. This effort of continuous participation in current psychoanalytical work must by accompanied by the necessary task of constantly re-examining and elaborating the basic texts.
To join the ranks of those who, not content to listen and learn, wish to be listened to - since they feel that they too have something to say - could, indeed, be considered criticizable. My justification for this act, which could easily be judged futile and annoying, lies basically in the following motives:

1. The light I have been able to shed on an unconscious fantasy, which I have never seen expressed clearly either in the literature or in discussions among colleagues even though many, indeed very many, basic psychoanalytic concepts make reference to it. I refer to what I have called the disappearance fantasy.
2. The second, more difficult to explain, involves on the one hand the desire and the need to have a basic platform - an organic statement, as relevant and as consistent as possible - from whence to address and elaborate isolated problems. This can only be accomplished with the kind of full presentation of concepts which a book affords.

On the other hand, there is a desire to render manifest an orientation of study and therapy aimed at a global vision of the human psyche. An orientation which leads to an equally global approach with the patient, utilizing such concepts as counter-transference, splitting, projective identification. The resulting tendency is towards active interpretation. The psychoanalyst, in this case, can no longer limit himself to regarding the problem of repression as foremost and must therefore relegate the silent, waiting stance to a back seat.
To put it another way, with this approach the analyst prefers to exercise an active, integrating, structuring role rather than wait for the patient to dig out his past defective unconscious mechanisms and then correct them, which I think is difficult if not impossible to achieve. A stance of this sort makes it possible to refute the therapeutic value of “free associations” understood as the imposition of incoherent and fragmentary thought upon the patient, and instead to regard as “free associations” all communications which the patient makes through his verbal and non-verbal mode of being.
Knowledge of the disappearance fantasy means the possession of a light which, in our relations with the psyches of others, can guide us in the search for a way out... of the whale’s belly. Not getting involved with the patient’s disappearance fantasy at the end of each session and during breaks, in the sense of annulling the work that has been accomplished, but rather being able to block the death instinct and thus transform it into knowledge. This is like being in possession of a more solid thread of coherence and relevance running through one’s relations with others. Perhaps we can be better placed to combat the adversary, “counter-transference neurosis”, which unquestionably involves confronting the fundamental problem of the disappearance fantasy in the sense of death instinct, that is instinct which is not transformed into an image of the object and then into thought directed towards the object.
A stance of this sort, although only briefly touched upon here, will, I think, be understood by my colleagues because it is the subject of continuous interest today. It is, moreover, the only one which can make it possible to discover and interpret the disappearance fantasy to which I have referred, and with this to set in motion, in transference, all those dynamic processes which would otherwise remain blocked, the disappearance fantasy being by its very nature inacessible to the consciousness of the individual’s Ego. This, as we shall see, is not only because the disappearance fantasy is a wholly unconscious phenomenon which may never have been conscious, unless it is bound to a concurrent libidinal impulse making it possible to achieve an image of the object; but also because it is an object relation mechanism which leads to an emptiness, a lacuna, an annihilation or even, in the most serious cases, to a more or less total annulment of the Ego.
This stance unquestionably requires more effort, more work, in analytical activities, and at the same time a personal stance of increased responsibleness in carrying out one’s own function as a psychoanalyst. This reponsibleness becomes possible only when one is really able to cure; when the analyst, advancing in his preparation, maturation and knowledge, can be more assuredly active in the work of interpretation. That is, he can relegate to the back seat the value of abreaction and of the benevolent, tolerant interhuman support (which, upon closer examination, may even prove to be criticizable elements)¹.
The analyst’s silence seen as a therapeutic analytical stance, and the waiting attitude, are easily linked to the problem of denying responsibleness and of not accepting the patient’s unconscious transference mechanism, that is to a problem of inconsistency (obviously the analyst has “accepted” the patient in analysis at the conscious level!). This responsibleness must be clearly distinguished from the problem of the assumption of guilt, the latter being a pathogical phenomenon linked to the dynamics of a human relationship based on projective identification.
The stance is thus one of a global approach of the analyst’s entire personality involved in the cure of the patient and, therefore, of responsibleness. These concepts are linked to that of the analyst’s therapeutic powers, which can only grow by developing an ever deeper knowledge of the dynamics of the human psyche.
Finally, in the context of a global approach to the patient, I believe that this book finds its justification in the fact that the disappearance fantasy - which in all likelihood pertains to the realm of drives, to the point where significant ties with the death instinct can be noted - cannot be considered in isolation from man’s other psychic dynamic processes and modes of being. I refer in particular to the problem of exhibitionism and the inner void, of unconscious or pre-conscious images of internal objects, of splitting and projection, of libidinal identification of the self, of non-being, incoherence, depression and masochism and so forth, to the point where, perhaps with further data, it may be possible to examine a problem which has become fundamental for all modern psychoanalysis, namely the problem of envy.
But more importantly, and this is fundamental, the disappearance fantasy is linked to the problem of knowledge and thought. That mysterious Sphinx «explanation and mystery of knowledge» (Corrao) may perhaps become less mysterious.
Bion’s work has focussed the attention of psychoanalysis onto the problem of knowledge most incisively. Having discovered this when the study of the disappearance fantasy had already been in progress for some years convinced me that it would be a mistake to refrain any longer from expressing the thoughts I had elaborated from my work and reading. Once again, the inhibition to advance towards the accomplishment of a personal thought, fruit of one’s own work of elaborating perceptions, would have operated, for fear of getting lost in the dark².
The penalty would have been the continuous stress of accomplishing mnemonic feats regarding the notions of others, with the unavoidable result of difficulty in the relationship with the “other”.

Those colleagues who have followed my work with sympathetic interest have asked me to explain the criteria I have used in recounting clinical cases. Indeed, I can see that the various analytical situations are not described according to a single criteria in the context of this book³.
In truth, I did not use any scheme of reference in recording these descriptions. When, in the course of elaborating the theory, the analytical event which had formed the basis for a particular conceptualization came spontaneously to mind, it seemed natural to report the analytical event itself. Just as a particular analytical event, in its gradual unfolding, had offered me the possibility to elaborate the thought, it came naturally to me to report the phenomenological basis for the elaboration to the reader, so that he might review with me how and to what extent theoretical knowledge derives from the experience of human relationships.
The problem of fidelity to what really took place in the analytical situation and what were the exact verbal expressions used, is connected to the problem of communicating the truth of the inter-human relationship itself. This relationship is reported faithfully when not only the objective data of perceivable reality are considered, but also the imponderable and subjective qualities of the interpersonal situation. Obviously, this can only take place when the event has been received, “forgotten”, and recreated in the memory-fantasy of the author. We can affirm the truth of this re-creation if we bear in mind that the analysand’s mode of being (the event to be reported) is what it is as a dynamic reality to the extent that it is in relation with the analyst, and that the dynamic event itself is impossible to conceive as a reality in itself isolated from object-relation.
The true event, therefore, can only be faithfully reported through the psychic participation of one of the partners who, at the moment when he commits the event to memory, makes of the other a partner and of the relation a dual “memory-fantasy” of his own observation.

Rome, December 1970


Note

1 H. RACKER, Studi sulla tecnica psicoanalitica, Armando, Rome 1976², p. 39.
2 The beginning of this paragraph reveals its latent truth when we read: «in view of the confusion, repetition, abstraction and near total triumph of the death instinct, I became convinced...» (1976)
3 They vary from the first case history, where the basic dynamics of an analysis which continued for several years are summarized, to the description of analytical sessions which are set down as if the verbal expressions of the two partners had been faithfully recorded; and, between these two extremes, there are more or less summarized descriptions of analyses of varying length.
We can verbalize the sense of the first case as the analyst’s counter-transferential elaboration in search of a human phenomenon, the death instinct in its expression as the disappearance fantasy. This is also true for the cases reported on pps. 169-171 which pertain to the research into the problem of avidity regarding the substance of the object. The cases described in the chapter on envy, instead, serve to illustrate the dynamics under discussion rather than to communicate the counter-transferential elaboration.

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Chapter I

The Disappearance Fantasy

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nowrished?
Reply, reply
It is engender’d in the eyes
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies:
Let us all ring fancy’s knell;
I’ll begin it. Ding dong, bell
Ding, dong, bell.*



Practioners of psychoanalysis are well aware that, among a multitude of problems, the one we encounter frequently if not invariably is the analysand’s reaction, behavioural or simply unconscious, when the analyst suspends the analytical sessions.
The analyst absents himself¹.
The patient experiences a frustration.

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The “absence” of the analyst

Before seeking to understand the meaning of the word frustration, I would like to respond to a possible objection. A response which may serve to corroborate the concept of the global approach to the patient in analysis and forestall an incoherent transfer approach.
I refer to the objection that references to and discussions regarding reality, such as the communication of the analyst’s need to absent himself, are addressed to the patient’s valid Ego and are therefore extra-analytical.
I do not think this objection is acceptable. I believe that everything which occurs in analysis should be considered within the context of the global relationship, conscious and unconscious, of the patient with the analyst (transference) and of the analyst with the patient (counter-transference).
I do not believe one can conceptualize a phenomenon wherein the analyst (or even the patient) would presume to suddenly eliminate or “forget about” the entire mechanism of transference and counter-transference and address the Ego of the patient who, just as extemporaneously, should then send his unconscious transference mechanism packing and respond with a routine acceptance of reality to an event which disturbs the regularity of the analysis itself.
Imposing the analyst’s personal needs upon the patient (and the same holds for being late or early for appointments, etc.) as a simple matter of reality, without considering them as part of the analytical process within the context of transference and counter-transference is, I think, a sudden annulment of the patient in toto along with his conscious and unconscious dynamics. It is, as I suggested above, an “absence” of the analyst, an analyst who suddenly becomes silent, who does not answer; an analyst who, as we shall see, has disappeared, has died.
In other words, these occurences are abrupt incoherences which allow the patient to corroborate his internal pathological realizations of identification and projection of altered images (or objects).
The analyst who, having set the session for 5 p.m., receives the patient ten minutes late allows the patient to apprehend as a reality his projection of incoherence. As I have witnessed more than once, the patient formulates a more or less unconscious thought along the following lines: «When he says something the analyst means something else. The analyst speaks in riddles». And thereafter, every time the analyst interprets, the patient is left in doubt about what the analyst might have meant beyond what he expressed verbally. The Sphinx², in such an instance of incoherence on the part of the analyst, is the analyst himself.
We are faced with a phenomenon in which the psychoanalytical situation is turned on its head. It is the patient who has to interpret the attitude and, more generally, the enigmatic behaviour of the analyst. We thus deduce that, in this moment of incoherence, the analyst is absent, has disappeared.
We conclude, therefore, that any intervening event, such as being early or late for sessions, omitted or mistaken interpretations, silences on the part of the patient or the analyst, as well as the beginnings and ends of sessions, are manifestations of two partners in the analytical situation. They are communications (we could say “free associations”) and, as such, are subject to interpretation, to a coherent verbalization of how, in the hic et nunc of the event, a specific realization of one of the partners has manifested itself along with the corresponding realization of the other partner.

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The problem of “frustration”

I am aware that, even though certain Authors³ have examined the problem of “the analysts’ vacations” it might seem unjustified and obscure to attribute the significance of an analytical problem to the absence of the analyst (a concept of absence which we have broadened to include psychological absence in the sense of a “vacation” taken by the analyst-as-interpreter, even though the physical object, the analyst, is present).
I feel it is opportune, therefore, to state at the outset that the entire content of this book can be considered, in a certain sense, as a study intended to clarify and elucidate this concept of “absence”, which is also a concept of not being, of disappearance.
At the beginning of the chapter, plucking the two sentences referring to absence and frustration out of the context of the discussion, we said that the analyst absents himself, cancelling one or more sessions⁴ and the patient experiences a frustration.
We shall now try to achieve as exact an understanding of this term as possible. Frustration is normally understood as preventing or opposing the satisfaction of a desire or a drive.
I think this limited definition is insufficient. If we consider a masochistic or generically auto-aggressive drive and we oppose it, we may say that we have frustrated the subject in satisfying his objective. But the reaction is frequently not hate but love, because we have prevented an auto-aggressive or generically non-evolutive realization. When, instead, we prevent a libidinal satisfaction - or, more exactly, one of knowledge, one which is evolving generically towards a more broadly human realization, towards a plus which seems as indefinite and vague as the so-called neurotic human manifestations to be modified appear increasing precise and specific - in this case we obtain not a development of the libido but hatred and realizations of a minus, of emptiness, disintegration, loss of evolutive potential. Consequently, we cannot accept the term frustration as meaning simply prevention of the satisfaction of drives.
In the analytical setting we must consider a specific interpersonal situation which is not normally taken into account in other situations of human relations.
The relationship of transference and counter-transference is established and accepted as part of the initial contract for psychoanalytic treatment. Afterwards it is the transference and counter-transference relationship which will constitute the basis and the matrix of each interpretation. The “facts of reality” lie outside the analytical situation, condensed and assumed in the original contract⁵.
A modification of the original contract leads to the insertion of a “fact of reality” into the psychoanalytical situation and hence to “confusion”, that is, to mixing reality and fancy within the interpersonal dynamic to the detriment of the achievement of the reality principle which is our aim.
Viewed in this situation of - let us call it pure - analytical setting, the concept of frustration begins to be revealed in all its complexity.
Within this conceptual framework, the term frustration is to be regarded as:

1. Frustration: contesting the needs of the patient;
2. Frustration: contesting the demands of the patient.

The “needs” of the patient are those infantile and isolated drives which tend towards direct satisfaction. These have their matrix in the perversion of instinct.
Within the analytical setting, the analyst frustrates, that is he opposes, the direct and indirect satisfaction of the patient’s instinctual needs. What is accepted, since the patient always succeeds in getting indirect sexual satisfactions, is included in the initial contract (assumption of reality): the handshake, the level of the analyst’s fee, looking at the analyst at the beginning and end of the sessions, the suspensions of sessions included in the initial contract.
In this case the term frustration is to be understood as preventing the blind satisfaction of the patient’s sexual instinct and the realization of the death instinct. That is, on the one hand we mean frustration of the patient’s greed (perversion of the sexual instinct) in that a direct satisfaction of this sort would lead him to introject a physical object and hence to projective identification, that is to a sadomasochistic relationship with the other person, experienced as a persecutory phantasm.
On the other hand, we mean frustration of the death instinct in its expression as an isolated drive against the analyst directed at eliminating him, rendering him non-existent, or at least devaluating him, modifying him in the sense of altering what he is, in fact, in terms of his human and, more specifically, his psychoanalytical reality.
Opposition to and prevention of the fundamental mechanism whereby the sadomasochistic relationship of introjective and projective identification leads ineluctably to loss of that sexuality which, however perverse it may be (greed), is a precious matrix for the development of seeing, consciousness and verbal thought once it has been contained and transformed.
In this context, non-frustration (consoling, reassuring, being indulgent about the fee and the patient’s “need” to miss sessions) would be an absence, an aggressiveness, would mean pushing the analysand towards a non-realization of the evolution of the self, towards regression with defusion of the instincts and splitting.
We consider the “demands” of the analysand as tendencies towards an evolutive object relation in which the instinctive drives (sex and death) are contained, are directed towards fusion and integration, and utilized for the development of knowledge and the potential for thought. Within the context of these demands, then, the analyst should never be frustrating.
Because our task is to satisfy the demands of the analysand to be helped through interpretation; to satisfy to the greatest extent and in the best way possible his demands to listen and to absorb the analyst’s attention, his care and his words. In this case the patient “contains” his sexual desires and we must satisfy them and help him to integrate them with the introjection of the image and of the quality (thought) of the analyst-object. In this case, non-satisfaction is frustration-aggressiveness, i.e. absence.
The following are apparently gratifications, but in reality frustrations-aggressiveness:

1. Examination of reality, in that we confuse the patient about the identity of the object-analyst who looks at reality with physical eyes and does not see the meaning of the patient’s communication.
2. Orders, advice, encouragement, reassurance, in that we confuse the patient about the identity of the analyst who demonstrates a sadistic attitude of imposition, coercion, control of the patient-object.
3. Communication of scientific notions, in that we confuse the patient about the identity of the analyst who puts inside the patient abstractions, or objects and images of objects which have not been elaborated.

Gratifications of demands are: interpretations of the patient’s communications, verbalization of the sense, the significance of the communication, verbalization of the patient’s transference relationship with the analyst. In this case, in other words, we give to the patient, we satisfy his demands to introject the words, knowledge and qualities of the analyst-object.
I think I must note, however, that the term frustration is generally taken to imply aggressiveness towards the object. That is, the term connotes: to coerce, to contest, contemporaneously and confusedly, both the patient’s needs and his demands. Behind a facade of affability and gratification, the analyst can give the patient the aforementioned frustration-agressiveness, and then frustrate-attack his sexual and death drives which have become further split and more loosely contained. From reassurance (caresses-kisses) to reproval (physically striking or abandoning the object).
Since the term frustration implies reference to an evolutive factor, we refuse to use it to designate any act addressing another person when this includes a destructive charge. When our behaviour towards the other is invalidated by a mors tua vita mea dynamic.
Otherwise it would be absurd, within the context of analysis itself, to conceive of analysis as continually frustrating. In analysing, in interpreting, we are opposing aggressive and disintegrative tendencies. If frustrating means instead addressing the other person with a destructive drive, this would make us the utmost in non-analysts. We would orient ourselves increasingly towards non-analytical attitudes and actions, examinations of reality, affability, advice and encouragement; in other words we would assume a good samaritan or pedagogical role⁶. We would revert to an interhuman approach based on ignorance of the individual’s unconscious and conscious, of his global mode of being, an approach based on splitting, incoherence, hypocrisy, struggle, non-acceptance of the other, on mors tua vita mea.
At this stage, it may be less difficult to accept the close connection between the problem-phenomenon of frustration and the problem-phenomenon of “absence”.
Frustration understood in a negative sense, as the expression of a counter-transferential emotional drive of aggressiveness (death instinct) derives, on careful examination, from an absence of the analyst. An absent analyst is one who relinquishes understanding and interpretation to assume a good samaritan or pedagogical role; one who overlooks (or at least underestimates) the analysand’s human situation in order to satisfy his own personal requirements. Such an analyst might resemble a human realization of a subject who does not contain his own needs. But a subject who does not contain his own needs cannot be conceived as an analyst. To put it another way, in that particular moment of frustration-aggressiveness, the analyst is not there, he is absent.
At this point, the very distinction between physical and psychical absence disappears. The analyst who physically absents himself from the session is not frustrating (aggressive) because of his physical absence but because he prefers to think of himself rather than of the analysand. He loses interest in the external object (or underestimates it). And, appearances notwithstanding, this loss of interest (absence), is not the lack of something but the active manifestation of a drive (the death instinct) directed against the external object⁷.
This last affirmation affords us a basis for conceptualizing the problem of frustration in the psychoanalytical setting.
In the first place, frustration should not be the active expression of an unconscious realization of the analyst, even if it is disguised by facts of reality. The analyst would, in fact, be actuating a drive without being aware of it, rather than, as it would appear, abstaining or being neutral. With this act, the analyst is no longer there, he presents the other person with that phenomenon of absence which is the first and fundamental “aggressiveness”.
An unconscious realization of this sort on the part of an unaware analyst, in its turn, includes ignorance of the evolutive (transformative) potential of the other person. And this “ignorance” should not be seen as a question of being able or not to undertake an examination of reality (make a diagnosis). Rather it is an active counter-transferential emotional impulse (an isolated drive of the death instinct) directed at negating, annulling the potential of the analysand himself.
At this stage, we are left with only one solution to clarify the concept of frustration in analysis. That is, that the analyst assumes a counter-transferential stance of non-participation in a relationship based on the tendency to satisfy the isolated drives directed against him by the analysand. In this case the (sexual and death) drives will not be attacked and destroyed by an analyst playing a Superegoic role, but rather will remain without an object for their realization. The remaining alternative is for the analysand to reintegrate the drives⁸.
In this case, too, the terms frustration and absence coincide. But now we can clarify the difference.
Frustration-absence is aggressiveness when it corresponds to the satisfaction of a need of the analyst, which, in turn, corresponds to the active expression of an isolated drive directed against the analysand.
Frustration-absence is understanding of and interest in the analysand when it corresponds to the analyst’s non-participation in the satisfaction of a need of the analysand, that is the expression of an isolated drive directed at the analyst. A non-participation which can exist only when the analyst understands the analysand’s communications (free associations).
To be even more precise, in the first case, the analyst is absent and the partial object which satisfies isolated drives is present. In the second case, the analyst is present and the partial object with which to satisfy isolated drives is absent.
Physical absence by the analyst outside the terms of the contract (incoherence) is always, therefore, frustration-aggressiveness in that, in that moment, what we find is not the analyst-interpreter but a subject who permits the satisfaction of the analysand’s drive to not relate to the object.

These considerations about the concept of frustration render more acceptable the initial affirmation that the analyst who absents himself physically outside the terms of the contract frustrates-attacks the analysand.
When the analyst absents himself he expects (adult) mature behaviour and, still more, an (adult) unconscious attitude from the patient; in other words he expects the patient to react to an event of reality (the cancellation of the session) which imposes a frustration on his libido by auto-regulating this very libido; by imposing a brake, a barrier to the satisfaction of him own (ambivalent) drives, using the validity of his own Ego as leverage.
That is, the analysand must “understand”, in other words interpret, the analyst’s behaviour. The analyst is therefore absent, as we noted before, and what is present is an external aggressive object.
The very ambivalence of the manner in which the transfer relation functions prevents comprehension-interpretation on the part of the analysand. By the terms of concept of transference itself the analyst is, a priori, a sadistic or generically deteriorated image. That is to say, the projection of identifications realized by the patient on the basis of current or previous ambivalence. For this reason, severance is abandonment, in other words an aggressive action on the part of the analyst. It cannot be accepted as an agreement but, instead, is experienced emotionally by the patient as an act of violence to which he reacts implicitly. The reactions may either be simply unconscious, involving modifications of the patient’s own inner structures, or also behavioural (acting-out). Such reactions result in a deficit of the Ego, an aggressive internal realization or the realization of a bad internal object which leads to a feeling of inferiority; a fact which, in turn, makes it impossible to accept the frustrating event of reality by hedging in the self, by self-regulation⁹.
The problem was thus posed of studying these realizations, which can generally be subsumed within the broader problem of identification with the aggressor¹⁰.

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The reaction of the analysand to the absence of the analyst

Anna Freud discusses this phenomenon, describing it as the transition from a passive to an active role through a particular combination of introjection and projection.
The external human event of the psychoanalyst’s announcement of a cancellation of the session is paralleled by an internal modification of the patient based on a fantasized omnipotent internal realization. The patient “identifies” with the analyst-aggressor. That is, he makes himself like the analyst, an external object imbued with aggressiveness, containing aggressiveness or being aggressiveness.
At this stage I believe it is necessary to go as deeply as we can into the question of the (bad) external agressive object. To do so, we shall make use of the famous example cited by Freud in Beyond the pleasure principle of the child who reverses his situation as an abandoned object (one who undergoes) to assume the active role wherein it is he who makes the object (wooden reel, mother) disappear and reappear.
The assumption is that the child identifies with the aggressive mother who abandons him. That is, the child makes himself like the external aggressive object; becomes, realizes himself as, the object - and does what it does.
But we cannot consider the external object (mother) who leaves the house or the psychoanalyst who cannot make it to the session to be aggressive, imbued with aggressiveness, bad. Even more emphatically, in the case of the death of the external object we cannot regard it as intended to injure the other object, to produce the minus to which we alluded earlier. But for the child or patient, the external object who takes its leave, who dies, is aggressive.
So to explain the concept of the bad external object we must resort to the concept of tension (anxiety) in the object relation, that is to the concept which, as we shall see, comprehends it, of the basic sadomasochistic object relation.
That is, within the context of the object relation the external object is not experienced emotionally in terms of its reality, of what it really is. The external object is always the projection (or at least also the projection) of a present or previous identification established on a basis of ambivalence.
Once this concept has been clarified the consequences are also clear: every act of the external object-analyst excepting interpretation is not reality but the expression of an emotional drive of the analyst himself directed against the analysand. In particular, abandonment (cancellation of the session) is an aggressive act directed against the analysand.
Returning to the concepts presented above, when the analyst cancels a session he is no longer the the analyst but an external object which, by expressing an isolated death drive (loss of interest), allows the analysand, in turn, to express an isolated death drive against the aggressive object. That is, the analysand is unable to endure the aggressive act and reacts by assuming an active role.
The phenomenon might be expressed in this way: «It is not I who am pushed away (made to disappear), it is I¹¹ who push away, make the object disappear (and eventually reappear)». The identification¹² does not take place with the real object (we may assume that the analyst who cancels a session does not want to push the patient away, make him disappear), but with a fantasized and, we must say, projected, unconscious image of the analyst.

At this point, bearing in mind that the analysand’s relationship is with the altered image of the analyst, we introduce a well-known concept: that of anxiety of loosing the object. We may say straight off that this is not a fear based on real danger but a veritable anxiety. There is no real danger or damage in a cancelled session, or in the summer break, or in the case of the mother who goes out for a few hours.
What does the child or the neurotic person fear? They need the object for reassurance. Of what?
The concepts presented above, particularly the indication that the relationship takes place between the subject and the altered image of the external object, lead us to infer that what the neurotic person (child, analysand) fears is not so much the absence of the object itself as the expression, on the part of the external object, of a drive to abandon him.
But not even this tentative conclusion explains the anxiety. An aggressive realization of the external object cannot cause anxiety. If we were to accept this, we would revert to the concept of real danger, that is danger originating in the external object. Hence, we can only conclude that what the child really fears is his own inner reaction faced with the fantasy of being attacked (abandoned, neglected).
Moreover, if we reconsider the two concepts of the reassuring physical presence and of the altered image of the object, we can note that although the external object is a sadistic image, its presence serves to neutralize another anxiety which is not the one implicit in the sadomasochistic relation with the external object.
The search for this other anxiety, this other danger, the potential damage resulting from an internal realization of the subject in his relation with the external object, leads us to the following formulation.
Greater damage than that caused by a sadomasochistic relation with the object can occur only through the realization of a non-relation with the object.
Moreover, the non-relation with the object is not caused by the external object in moving away from the subject, since we already know that the child does not endure the event in a passive state but assumes an active role.
The active role and the concept that the problem lies in the absence of the external object must of necessity lead us to conclude that what the child fears is his reaction against the menacing (sadistic) object, a reaction directed at making the sadistic object itself disappear.
The physical presence of the object is a reality which enables the child to avoid realizing as true (omnipotent) the fantasy that it was he who caused the event: disappearance of the object. The reaction of the child (analysand) in terms of his unconscious fantasy when confronted by the event of “absence” is to be regarded as a disappearance fantasy.
The external object (breast, mother, father or any other libidinal object) is gratifying so long as it does not allow the child to realize the disappearance fantasy. It is aggressive when it does allow this, that is when it absents itself. In this moment the child is prey to his own fantasy of eliminating the object. He realizes himself as aggressive in toto in his mode of being. In this moment, the problem of ambivalence is surpassed and the elimination of the object is experienced emotionally as pure aggressivity. His unconscious realization is that the absence, the disappearance of the object was due to him, to a drive-fantasy of his. Reality, the absence of the object, has favoured the omnipotent realization of the unconscious disappearance fantasy.

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A case history

The patient is 34 years old when he comes to me. He is tense; although his behaviour is carefully controlled, he is unable to hide his anxiety. He wants to go into analysis, he says, and then blurts out, «I’m afraid I’m schizophrenic». He says that another analyst, although he had given him my name for treatment, said that he should resign himself to the hopelessness of a cure. I know from another colleague who followed his case in a clinic that he has schizophrenic disorders. Aural hallucinations, reference delirium, depersonalization.
The story of his life is essentially as follows.
He remembers that two family friends jokingly (?!) told him at about the age of eight that «he had been born because a child of theirs had died». His parents «had given birth to him as a reaction!» He attends school normally. He goes to live at a relative’s house in the country. At the age of 18 he loses his father. He succeeds in getting the middle school diploma, but does not continue with school. The illness breaks out in force in the form of autoplastic depersonalization, i.e. bodily deformations of the legs and arms. These disorders dated back to a few years before, with fears of the war, mutilation, blindness. This, however, had not prevented him from going on with his schooling. By about age 25 his possibilities for operating within the framework of reality are virtually nil. He is completely absorbed with the “idea of his legs”. He begins psychotherapy which lasts for two years and is interrupted by his being committed to a clinic and E.S. treatment; he had become dangerous and was going around with a knife. And in fact it is after other commitments with intensive E.S. treatment that he comes to my studio.
The transfer approach, from the very first session, is euphoric and exhibitionistic. He talks about himself, his problems. Concepts of the damaged breast, mother dependence, orality are expounded.
I understand immediately that they are notions, gleaned from prior psychotherapy, without any elaboration. I am able to foresee a counter-transferential danger of “euphoric contagion” and I avoid going along with it and answering this euphoric-exhibitionist process with hyper-interpretations¹³. I accept the depressive role of “being accused”, intuiting that the accusations must be directed towards the previous therapeutist who, having been abandoned, had become «I dependent and incriminated» (Racker).
The acceptance of this role does, in fact, allow the patient to filter real communications through the exhibitionist-verbal screen allowing me the beginnings of an equally real comprehension of the patient.
Two basic elements are summed up in two dreams:

«From the balcony of her house, a woman inside a car smashes down onto the ground».
«A mother is murdering a child so that others won’t kill him. Then he shoots and kills some people. Then he was supposed to kill his father».

I understand that the patient is telling me:

a. that the object relation with the mother is broken: from the balcony = his mother’s arms, he falls and dies;
b. that, therefore, his identification with the mother is fatal because she murders the baby and so, accordingly, a maternal transfer would lead to the anxiety of being killed by the analyst;
c. that he was then supposed to kill his father.

This then suggests to me that “first” there must have been the possibility of establishing a valid identification with the father, and that, if an analysis of the most primitive situations of his life were begun, even this identification would be lost and the result would be total catastrophy¹⁴.
The first months of analysis go by and it is time for the summer break. Analysis is resumed in september and no particular disturbances are noted. By now I know what road we have to follow: the search for the father image in the unconscious. Achieve a valid identification which can withstand transference and then move on to the interpretation of the more primitive anxieties.
Indeed the patient demonstrates the correctness of this approach by a growing calmness and the gradual disappearance of the euphoric-exhibitionist attitude. Real communications from him, even though rare, increase in number and make possible a growing understanding on my part. He tells of the death of his father when he was 18. The inability to continue his studies. The crisis at age 25 related to his interest in a girl which led him to psychosis and hospitalization.
Agreement is reached on the conclusion that you need something in order to withstand a relationship with a woman; this something, it will later be specified, is the undestroyed father figure.
We call it the fundamental identification. Without this, with a woman you die. While this work of reconstructing the father figure is going on, this search for the basic identification (the basic platform, the patient says), the patient starts to raise the problem of holidays during which there is no session. Before and after holidays he appears bored, withdrawn, often he skips a few sessions. He says that things are going badly. His head feels empty, the analysis is a mess.
This is the problem of the absent analyst. What is happening?

1. The patient accuses the analyst of harming him.
2. It is not the analyst who is present but the absent one who is harming him. Why?
3. The cause of the harm is not the abandonment by the analyst but the aggressive reaction of the patient himself to the event: absence of the analyst.
4. What is the aggressive reaction in terms of an unconscious fantasy? It is not the external object which goes away; it is I who make it disappear. A child confronted with a non-gratifying reality turns its head or closes its eyes. It moves the external object away from itself until it makes it disappear.
5. The effect of the outer-directed unconscious omnipotent disappearance fantasy is the realization of:
a. emptiness and inner darkness;
b. negation or disappearance of the self: because the outer object is the projection of an inner ego situation (identification with the father).

This is what had happened at the time of the “absence”, that is the death, of the father. This is what is happening every time the analyst absents himself during holidays. The patient responds to these ever broader and more exact interpretations, focussing his attention on the period of absence when his father was in the army and he remained alone with his mother.
That is, he was alone with his mother in the absence of his father. «And during that period you masturbated», I add.
The patient recalls that shortly after this period people told him he was «different»; thinner, scared-looking, with his eyes always wide open «as if he wanted to see everything, all the time».
This means, I interpret, that you realized your virility and sexual pleasure together with the fantasy of having made your father disappear. You realized yourself as empty, aggressive in the sense of totally aggressive, because nothing remained inside yourself just as, in fantasy, nothing remained of your father. With this you realized death, emptiness instead of validity-virility. Like the ripe ears of grain which you saw the peasants cut down. You felt mature and strong because of the erection and the freedom but, because of the disappearance fantasy directed against your father, this became death.
The patient does not want to spend the vacation period with his fiancée. He does not want to repeat the experience of remaining alone with a woman, this time in the absence of the analyst. In september, he will recount that when he went to see her for a few days he was very uncomfortable. A sense of estrangement from the world and the fiancée, sensing that she was bad, mean, that she hated him, that perhaps she wanted to kill him to be free to go with other men.
In fact it is just this relationship with a woman (I repeat, interpreting) which is fatal if it is experienced in the “absence” of the father; that is to say, in the absence of the fundamental identification which you annulled when you made me, the analyst, disappear during the summer vacation, not having accepted that the analysis could be postponed to the following month.
The following year (1965-1966) focussed on the analysis of the patient’s depersonalization and the period of puberty, working on the basis of continual interpretations of the disappearance fantasy which intervened at every holiday and at the end of every session, as an annulment of the work accomplished¹⁵.
He had repeated, aggravating it, the mechanism set in motion in childhood. That is to say: the fantasy of abandoning his father, making him disappear. He had realized an affective break with his father who had become a stranger because he was no longer invested with libido; the physical absences of the father were his disappearances, his annulments. He remembers insistently an episode of a boy who had grabbed onto a cord while climbing up a bell tower and, letting it go, had fallen.
The episode is interpreted as his affective break with his father. The real dynamic with the father had been covered up carefully by anxiety over having lost, that is not having seen again, a middle school professor. The patient said that he understood that there must have been a disappearance fantasy directed against his professor. But he hadn’t understood enough. Behind the “disappearance” of the professor was the annulment, the negation, of the person and the personality of the father who he had “made to disappear”, rendered dead, non-existent, not loving him any more. The dynamics of this all of this unconscious fantasy had a particularly intense drive base not only in the fact of masturbation but above all in the first ejaculation, which had caused him to realize an ego transformation which had become depersonalization.
«I was a real mess», he says, «and, in fact, I thought it was because of the masturbation». Not so much the masturbation, I interpret, as the disappearance fantasy which he enacted during masturbation. The experience of losing weight, becoming ugly, and being scared when he was little had, through ejaculation and with the realization of the bodily change connected to this physiological phenomenon, culminated in “a physical mess”, definitive alterations of the arms and legs. Due to the disappearance fantasy, the emptiness and inner darkness had become alteration and physical impotence.
Subsequently, the interpretation goes deeper. Because of this association between virility and death or emptiness and aggressiveness, linked to the fantasy of having made his father disappear, his penis had become a knife which could only disembowel a woman and his sperm had become poison. A reversal of the sexual drive had actually been realized. From ejaculation and giving sperm to taking the contents out of a woman’s belly. He has a dream:
«I was stabbing a woman in the belly and taking out little pieces of gold».

I interpret that, through the disappearance fantasy directed against his father, he had realized himself as completely aggressive, the penis was a stabbing knife; ejaculating - putting sperm into the woman’s belly - meant taking the feces from it. To penetrate a woman and give sperm and babies had become, for him, killing and stealing. I am therefore in a position to explain why, at age 25, his relationship with a girl had meant psychosis and hospitalization. Sexual desire for the girl was experienced by him, as we have said, as murdering her by stabbing her to death, eating her insides and feces and the babies which, as he saw it, were contained in her.
The other area of work carried out in this phase of analysis, within the framework of the counter-transference relation, concerned the utter destruction of external objects which had been made to disappear, rendered non-existent and annulled. It becomes evident that the basic problem of relationship with the external object analyst is that the analyst is almost always “absent” even when he is present, and hence is fearful, aggressive, a persecutory phantasm that the patient “comes to control”. Only the active presence of the analyst who takes interest, understands and explains, succeeds each time, session after session, in neutralizing the unconscious fantasy.
It comes to light, I said, that the transference relation with the external object, the dead or fantasized analyst, is dual. It is as if there were always two, as if this object were double. Now concurrently the previous and the present therapist, the next minute the relative and the real father, then the middle school professor, and then (and when transference recalls this fantasy anxiety turns to panic) the friends of the family with their baby who died before his birth.
It is this latter fantasy (more accurately, inner realization) which constitutes the nucleus of the complete internal catastrophy and which explains why the previous therapy, based on the relation with the partial breast object, had led to the rupture and the patient’s manic, exhibitionist realizations.
As we have said, as a little boy the patient had achieved autonomy-liberty-virility with the disappearance fantasy directed against his father, i.e. with the annulment-disappearance of his fundamental identification: the structuring of the total father object. With this he had realized a regression back into the mother’s womb. He had masturbated while experiencing oral fantasies of destroying the partial breast object (he was alone together with his mother) and had therefore rendered orality, the matrix of the object relation, unacceptable because it was too destructive. «He continually dreamed of fires», that is libido = fire which destroys.
The separation from his father, realized with the fantasy of having made the father disappear, had unleashed the process: disappearance of the total object, annulment of the Ego, precipitation into a chaos of drives directed towards the partial object without the support of a valid Ego, that is, precipitation towards destructive omnipotence. Libido-destruction-fire. The reunion with the father had then blocked the process and permitted a certain, albeit vague, restructuring of the total object, but which was experienced in a persecutory fashion.
Subsequently, when the friends of the family told him that he had been conceived because their baby had died, the regressive process presented itself anew because of the reality which confirmed the fantasy.
What had happened? In order to understand we have to specify that the disappearance fantasy, the annulment of the fundamental identification with the total object which is then projected onto the father, is linked to a fantasy of not being, of not being born, of returning to the darkness and ominpotence of the intra-uterine situation¹⁶.
In this basic realization of disappearance fantasy-not being- being in the mother’s womb, the omnipotence of the fantasy is absolute. His own aggressive fantasies can destroy the life that was before him because he, from inside his mother’s womb, had destroyed it.
The thought child-penis-breast enabled me to intuit the key to the patient’s problem.
If we consider that, for the unconscious, the child was the father’s penis which, in turn, had its first matrix in the partial breast object, we can understand how the patient, through the disappearance fantasy directed against the father linked to the family friends’ “joke”, had realized a total destructiveness and with it had blocked off every access to life, i.e. every possibility to have an object relation, because he had already destroyed the partial breast object before birth.
The intuition of the first dream is confirmed by the following explanation: the woman inside the car is himself, that is himself “identified” with the mother, who, inside the car, that is inside the mother’s womb as a result of the disappearance fantasy, no longer maintains the object relation and, because of the destructive fantasies described above, falls from the balcony (mother’s arms) and smashes up.
And the second dream too: the mother who murders the child. He himself who murders himself. Why? So as to avoid being killed by others, to avoid “him killing others - the father and the father’s penis” and with this his fundamental identifications. The then we noted before is also explained. The patient had experienced a normal (more or less normal) period of relations with his parents. He had realized an identification with the father on an ambivalent basis. The “absences” (military service and death) of the father, since the father was also his own ambivalent identification projected onto the real father, were expressions of “aggressiveness” on the part of the father.They were excuses or pretexts that the father found to abandon him, to set in motion a drive aimed at eliminating him. And the patient had reacted to this approach of the father, as he experienced it, by eliminating him in his turn, i.e. by his realization of making the father disappear.
«He moved from a passive to an active role».
And thus he was left with darkness and emptiness, since the father was also, as we have said, his own fundamental identification projected outwards. Having made this identification disappear, in addition to being dark and empty, the patient was nonexistent, non-being, unborn. He was in the situation of being in the intra-uterine darkness of the mother’s womb.
Within this inner realization, masturbation and sexual drives directed towards the object (breast, penis, child) were destructive. Love-destruction (fire). When he heard the family friends say that he had been born because a baby had died, his realization was that before birth, in the womb, his sexual drives had destroyed the object of his sexual (affective) relation¹⁷.
It was this intuition of the then of the dream that led me to the conviction that “first” there must have been a structuring identification which then had been lost. Then, when? At the time of the separations from the father with the realization of an “activity”, the disappearance fantasy, and confirmation in reality (departure for military service and death). Then confirmation in reality that even his sexual (affective) drives were destructive, when he heard that his birth was connected with the death of a baby.
He therefore “murders” (abandons) himself, ceaselessly negates the child growing within himself in the situation of his relation with the analyst, in order to prevent “the others” from killing him. To prevent his father from abandoning him (his abandoning the father through the disappearance fantasy) and hence repeating the catastrophy described above.
Indeed one of the fundamental themes of the analysis is that the patient ceaselessly “murders” his own unconscious, repudiates those dreams in which he shows some evolution and bond with the object. That is he negates and repudiates himself, the child within. Until one day when, on the occasion of a break in the analysis, he attempts suicide by jumping out of a window «to break his legs». This at precisely the point in analysis corresponding to the severance from his father - even though this had been interpreted several times over. In other words, he strikes at his legs after having made the analyst disappear.
I know from experience with other patients that the legs correspond to a realization of identification with the breast. When there is something wrong with the legs, there is a problem of severance from the breast, in the sense of a loss and a void. I am able to foresee that it corresponds to a disappearance fantasy against the breast at the time of weaning. That is, a severance with failure to realize an internal image.
The patient had thus repeated, in transference, the dynamic set in motion in his childhoold. Disappearance fantasy directed against the analyst, realization of inner darkness and emptiness, have been unborn in the mother’s womb. He then “breaks his legs”, i.e. he attacks and strikes at the brest object, and, with this, he destroys his realization of identification with it.
He is confused, in a state of psychomotory agitation. He is examined by various psychiatrists who diagnose a condition of disassociation, schizophrenia, psychomotory agitation.
I wait for him to call me, which he naturally does, and I continue the analytical sessions in the hospital.
You have murdered the child who would have made the father-analyst disappear, I interpret. The patient is both angry and moved. He cannot understand why I continue to carry out the analysis with him. As he sees it, there is a fantasized inner reality which is that the child inside himself must not live, and the analyst opposes this. It is a struggle between his inner, rooted, absolute fantasy world and the analyst’s knowledge and interpretation: «Light and darkness», comments the patient.
Once released from the hospital, the patient continues the sessions as usual in the analyst’s study.
I understand even better why a therapy like the preceding one, focussed immediately on the partial breast object, was bound to fail. It was, as we have said, a partial object destroyed a priori. It was necessary to understand the basic stages in the evolution of the patient’s life, that is the childhood masturbation crisis, to be able to understand the disappearance fantasy and the regression back into the mother’s womb and from there the masturbatory fantasies of the destruction of the partial penis-breast object, the final touch being the “reality” of the “death of the baby” before his birth.

At the present time, the patient is working through the problem described above and is locked in a struggle between resolving the adolescent crisis with repetition of the abandonment of the father, or overcoming it and maturing. Maturing means going beyond the disappearance fantasy and accepting the analyst and hence his identification with the total father object.
By now the analysis has lasted several years and the interpretation focusses on the “joke”, the “witty comment” of the friends of the family.
I interpret the disappearance fantasy, the annulment of the father and of his projected identification, his regression back to the mother’s womb and his experiencing, in this inner realization, the incessant destruction of the analyst’s possibility of giving him anything valid. He brings a dream:

«It was like a lake: inside there was a woman swimming. Someone spilled milk which spread through the water».

I interpret: the woman in the water represents your affectivity, yourself with the possibility of accepting the analyst’s help. But you are in the water, meaning you are experiencing a situation of darkness as a result of the disappearance fantasy, as if you were still inside the mother’s womb, not yet born. The vital and fertile things that the analyst gives you, and which you try to give to yourself, get lost in the water. When you heard the family friends telling you that their baby died before you were born, you realized an intra-uterine, pre-natal life as being destructive of your possibility of having a good relation with this child (breast) when you would be born.
Therefore, you are not born, you are afraid to be born, because you think you won’t find a breast with which to have a relation¹⁸.
First you fantasized that you had made your father disappear and, along with him, your realization as a man. Then you saw him again and calmed down partially. When you found out about the dead baby, you resumed the fantasy of not being born and realized it as definitive, because from that situation you had also destroyed the son of the father, the penis, i.e. the validity of the father from whom you could derive sustenance and life.
Shortly after this, he brings another dream:

«I had sexual intercourse with a woman but I didn’t get up. I just stayed there».

I interpret: by accepting to take back into yourself your affectivity, including the disappearance fantasy, you also realize the possibility of human (sexual relation) but you are still unable to think about separations and breaks. You are afraid that with a break you will again enact the disappearance fantasy, the darkness and the emptiness.
Recently he recounts that his wife told him she was thinking of bringing him home a child of a neighboring farmer. The birth appears again, the baby born, the Ego. The mother who had told him that her baby had died and blamed him for his own birth now tells him that he has reappeared.
In other words, in accepting his own sexual affectivity, he acquires the power to make reappear the image of the vanished object.


Note

* W. SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 2.
1 We shall come back to this term to examine how it may entail a psychological, as well as a physical, absence, when the analyst fails to understand or to interpret correctly.
2 See considerations on the Sphinx, p. 300.
3 See, for example, D. MELTZER, Il processo psicoanalitico, Armando, Rome 1971. And, in fact, they have not examined anything. They have simply repeated, as always, what Freud said. Cfr. Inizio del trattamento in S. FREUD, Opere, Boringhieri, Torino 1975, vol. VII, p. 337.
4 Or, we repeat, fails to interpret exactly, i.e. loses interest in the patient (psychical absence).
5 Note carefully: they are not annulled.
6 Absence and repression are the two aspects of violence with which human psychic reality has always been confronted.
7 At this point, a basic aspect of the argument should be stressed. Absence, indifference, “scientific” neutrality is not the lack of, but rather the active expression of a drive. This discovery will (finally!) make it possible to isolate and clarify the dimension of human drives as a way of relating to reality, and to put an end to resignation (1976).
8 The reference to the concept of abstinence is fairly obvious, but might be clarified. It means active, conscious refusal of the dimensions of a split, partial relation. It is thus neither indifference nor “scientific” neutrality. Cfr. the dimension of refusal in La marionetta e il burattino, Nuove Edizioni Romane, Rome 1999⁷.
9 I cite a patient’s dream as an example. «She was returning to Rome on foot from her vacation. She stopped at a first station which was empty and abandoned. In a second station there were people. Here she found the bracelet and the chain she had been wearing around her neck, which she had lost. It took her five hours». I noted that five months of analysis had gone by since the summer break. Five months of analytical work had been necessary for the patient to recover the possibility of rapport with the analyst.
The first station represented a period in which the patient had been absent because of a physical ailment. The second represented other holidays which the patient had agreed to accept in accordance with the contract and where, as a result, she recovered her sexuality-affectivity (the chain being the mouth and the bracelet the hand).
10 We find this formulation incomplete and confusing. The concept of identification which, in turn, implies the concept of introjection, is different from the concept of making oneself equal to (and greater, in the sense of a plus, which is a concept of more aggressive) in which there is no mechanism of introjection of the object.
11 This is the realization of the so-called (hegelian) Ego as annulment of the other, an other which is actually projective identification (“negation”): the Ego of indifference and abstract reason (1976).
12 The term “identification” is not exact. I leave it for the moment, but will explain further on that the phenomenon we are examining here in one of “making oneself equal” to the fantasized aggressive object. That is, it should not be regarded as a dynamic of introjection of the object, but rather as an unconscious realization directed against the object.
13 In RACKER, Studi sulla tecnica psicoanalitica, cit., p. 188, the dynamics of this have recently been brought into clear focus, i.e. the way in which the manic transference of the analysand is met by the depressive-paranoid counter-transference of the analyst.
14 The then is fundamental. This will be developed in the distinction between the disappearance fantasy at birth, which goes to make up the armour of indifference and which contains the Ego of the unconscious calm sea, and the disappearance fantasy which take place against the projected identification after the interhuman relationship, i.e. the dynamics of the sadomasochistic relation which culminates in indifference (schizophrenia). (1976).
15 Penelope?
16 Consider the expression “to see the light” used to describe birth. Darkness = disappearance fantasy - closing the eyes = regression into the mother’s womb.
17 The Absolute mors tua-vita mea beyond the sadomasochistic relation. The non-relation, the impossibility of it, schizophrenia. The concept of cause in the inter-human relation: he was because the other was dead. (1976).
18 The disappearance fantasy, after the sadomasochistic interhuman relation, annuls the Ego of birth, the prenatal relation with the amniotic fluid... and man is left with the conviction that they never existed. Cfr. p. 143: «(...) no one has ever loved me (...), and it’s not true» and pp. 117-119.

(traduzione a cura di Nora McKeon)

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