Feelings and their Absence from the Analytic Setting

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

Introduction

In this paper I would like to examine the connection between feeling, thinking and acting
out as related to the issue of violence. I will present clinical material derived from the
analysis of two patients. One, a young male adult, had presented severe violent behaviour
prior to the beginning of his analysis. The second, a middle-aged woman, was close to
violence against the analyst in the consulting-room. Through their analysis I came to
understand that for these patients violence represented an attempt to find a refuge from
feelings towards the analyst which they experienced as unbearable. These feelings were
related to terrifying phantasies about the relationship with the analyst, an imago of an all-
engulfing mother and a belief in the primal scene as an act of violence (see Perelberg 1995a).
When they came to analysis both patients lacked an affective understanding of these
phantasies which were repeatedly externalized in their relationships.
In the first section of the paper I will outline some points of reference in the
psychoanalytic literature on affect. I will then present some of my own thoughts on the
theme, derived both from the literature and from my understanding of some of my patients in
analysis. I will then examine some clinical material relating to two specific patients in the
light of these hypotheses.

Some Points of Reference in the Literature

Throughout his work Freud continuously discussed the relationship between affect and idea
as components of human experience. In the first phase of his work, Freud's formulations
were couched in energy terms. Affect was equated with energy and symptoms represented
the need for the mind to rid itself of large quantities of such affective energy to restore its
equilibrium (Sandler 1982). Affect was linked to discharge and thus the link between
affective experience and the body was stressed. Freud did not distinguish between the
psychic and the somatic and discussed mainly the negative affects, such as those that denote
suffering, distress or anxiety (Stein 1991, p. 5).
In the second period of his work, throughout the elaboration of the topographical model,
three themes permeated Freud's writings: the issue of quality, the problem of the
transformation of affect, and the question of unconscious affect. Throughout this

This paper is an abridged version of the paper which was presented to the conference organized jointly
by the Freud Museum and the British Journal of Psychotherapy. Rosine Jozef Perelberg PhD is a
Member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and Associate Editor of the New Library of
Psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of PsychoA nalysis and co-
editor of Gender and Power in Families. Address for correspondence: 35 Hodford Road, London NW 11
8NL.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, V ol 12(2), 1995

© The author
Thinking about Feelings: Perelberg 213

phase of his work Freud's main interest was dream symbolism and the elaboration of the
mental apparatus. Thus the role of affects was secondary to that of representations (Green
1973). Freud was also interested in the fluidity of affects in connection with ideas so that
affects can be allowed expression, be suppressed or be turned into their opposite. Affects
become the pointers to missing thoughts: the ideational material has undergone
displacements and substitutions, whereas the affects have remained unaltered. It was only in
1926 that anxiety was perceived as an affective signal, a response of the ego indicating the
likely occurrence of a danger situation. The new theory of anxiety also introduced the object
into the conceptualization of anxiety.
The energy concept, nevertheless, still remained an essential part of psychoanalytical
theory in the third phase. However, by pointing out in 1926 that anxiety or fear could also
arise as a consequence of the perception of dangers in the real world, Freud linked affects to
subjective experience, phantasy and objects. In the same paper Freud went further and
suggested that the affects of the patients in analysis were reproductions of earlier affective
experiences, thus linking affect and memory. This was the result of a long pathway taken by
his various models on affect, memory and symptom. Already in 1896 in a letter to Fliess,
Freud had stated that `consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive' (Freud 1896, p.
234). Memory thus belongs to the unconscious. The task of the analyst 'is to make out what
has been forgotten from the traces which it (repression) has left behind or, more correctly, to
construct it', as Freud suggested in his work on constructions in analysis (Freud 1937, p.
259). This position opened the way for the modern view that affective states which have
never been put into words can be repeated and understood in the analytic experience.
Since Freud, the way in which affects can be used in different ways in the analytic
situation has since been widely discussed in the literature (see, for instance, Jones 1929;
Rapaport 1953; Schur 1965; Loewald 1971; Kernberg 1991; Shapiro & Emde 1992; Blum
1992; Spezzano 1993, for discussions of the specific relationship between affect and
psychoanalytic theory or theory of technique). Klein has also developed a theory of mental
life based on the conflict between feelings of love and hate. Stein has suggested that for Klein
objects are created by feelings. Mechanisms such as projective identification, splitting, denial
and manic triumph differentiate and seclude 'all-bad' objects. On the other hand, 'good'
feelings such as concern, gratitude and love establish or restore good objects which, once
introjected, create a good self as object (Stein 1991, p. 90). Early feelings are assumed to be
harder to bear and more difficult to verbalize. Primitive feelings such as idealization, terror,
persecutory anxiety or triumph are characterized as being extreme and crude, unmitigated
and unqualified.
Several psychoanalysts have differentiated between affect as a metapsychological
concept and feelings as a description of a feeling state (Green 1973; Shapiro & Emde 1992;
Blum 1992). Blum has suggested that affects evolve from innate potentials and that basic
affects can be categorized as happiness, sadness, surprise, interest, fear, disgust, contempt
and anger (p. 266). Klein, however, suggested a wide range of powerful affects such as oral
rage, paranoid terror, depressive anxiety, gratitude, concern, regret, despair and omnipotence
(Spezzano 1993, p. 93) which have become central to psychoanalytic thinking. In 1946 Klein
saw her legacy as a theory of affects, '(my approach) was predominantly from the angle of
anxieties and their vicissitudes' (p. 3).
Since the works of Winnicott, Brierley and Bion, psychoanalysts from all the groups in
the British Society have emphasized the connection between primary affective
214 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1995) 12(2)

development and object relationships. Winnicott indicated that affective development has to
include the mother's affects and her capacity to tolerate, sustain and relay affective messages
to the baby, in a way which allows the baby to integrate them. For the British School the
inclusion of the analyst's affective states in the sessions - the understanding of the
countertransference - became increasingly part of the central analytical task. It is in the
process of holding, containing and transforming feelings which cannot be elaborated by the
patients themselves that the analytic work is carried out. Klein had already suggested that
there are 'pre-verbal emotions ... (which are) revived in the transference situation ... (and
which) appear . . . as "memories in feelings", which are reconstructed and put into words
with the help of the analyst' (Klein 1937, p. 316). More recently the understanding of the
countertransference has become the main area of work from which the understanding of
feeling states in the analytic session is derived.
In 1977 Limentani identified the main areas of discussion in the understanding of affect:
(1) affect as a drive; (2) the debate about the existence of unconscious affects; (3) the
relationship between affects and their mental representations and phantasies; (4) the
possibility of affects being dissociated from objects; (5) the ego as the only seat of anxiety; (
6) the problem of narcissistic and borderline disturbances; (7) the question of technique in
the treatment of borderline and narcissistic patients (p.171). He stressed, however, that
affective states are object related: it is the object which is invested with affects rather than
ideas which are affectively charged. Limentani also made one point which is specifically
relevant to this paper when he stated that:

The success or failure of an analysis could in fact be said to rest on the degree of affective changes
which take place during its course.

I think that Limentani's statement relates affect and meaning. Many writers have written
about the intrinsic link between the capacity to think and to symbolize. The relationship
between the capacity to feel and the capacity to think has been less emphasized. I would like
to suggest in this paper that meaning requires integration between affect and ideational
content, i.e. mental representation.
This is the way in which I also understand Bion's formulations. There is an equivalence,
for Bion, between emotions and knowledge (Bion 1962, pp. 74-5):

Before an emotional experience can be used for a model its sense data have to be transformed into
alpha elements to be stored and made available for abstraction. In minus-K the meaning is
abstracted, leaving a denuded representation.

By thinking about emotional experiences and by understanding them, the mind

comprehends meanings.
Bion called knowledge (K) an emotion, on a par with love (L) and hate (H), all of which
are called `links', a term in which the emotional, the relational and the cognitive dimensions
converge. All knowledge was assumed to have its origins in primitive `emotional experience'
. Feelings have to be contained and processed in a certain manner in order to become truthful
knowledge and, inversely, there can be no knowledge that is not emotional (and personal) at
root (p. 102).

Hypothesis

According to this approach, the emotional dimension is a constituent of knowledge and not
external to it. Phenomena and experiences are emotionally motivated and it is
Thinking about Feelings: Perelberg 215

that which determines their meaning for the individual. The incorporation of feelings into the
psychic sphere, in early life, presupposes the experience of having had a caregiver able to
reflect on the mental states of the infant, able to be both a witness of and a participant in a
child's emotional development. When this process does not take place, there may be an
emotional arrest and a disavowal of the need for the object. This state of mind combines
denial of the need for the object, grandiosity and a dramatic compulsion to destroy the object
in order to defend one's survival. This is what some patients bring to the analytic encounter.
In the analytic situation it is the analyst who has to be able to take in and reflect on her
patients' feelings and desires and return them in a more digestible form.
Both patients I will present in this paper share the tendency to attack the body violently.
The first patient was violent against others and had breached the body boundary of another
person in violent ways. Although the second patient was actually close to attacking me in my
consulting-room, the object she actually attacked via the various somatic symptoms she
presented throughout her analysis was projected into her own body. In both examples, I
would suggest, it was ultimately the phantasy of the mother's body which was being attacked,
a mother who was experienced as being in possession not only of my patients' bodies, but
also of their affective and cognitive experiences. The comparison between these two patients
will allow me to suggest that both the psychosomatic symptoms and the violent acts are
attempts to destroy the obstacle imposed by the other's existence (see also Perelberg 1994).
The violent act is an attempt to readdress an experience of danger.

Karl

In his analysis it has been possible to trace, in the vicissitudes of the transference, the
contexts in which Karl's violent thoughts and behaviours surfaced (see Perelberg 1995a for a
more detailed discussion of this patient's analysis). They were, each time, related to the
terrifying anxiety about a breakdown in the space he attempted to maintain in the
transference to me. When the analyst understood him, Karl had to disappear by not coming
to his sessions for a while. At the beginning of the analysis this was basically expressed in
the states of sleep Karl would get into, from which he could not be awakened, neither by
several alarm clocks nor by his mother shouting at him. He could disappear from the sessions
for a week, for instance, without realizing that this time had gone by since his last session.
The interpretations, during this period, consistently pointed to this complete retreat both
from the encounter with the analyst and from the obstacles Karl necessarily experienced in
the relationship with me. Karl's sleep was dreamless, and this was also interpreted as a flight
not only from me, but also from the experience of having a mind. He also compulsively
played computer games in which violence would be expressed in a robotic way against
dehumanized enemies. Contact with actual living people was tremendously difficult for him,
involving a level of frustration, violence and fear that he could not tolerate.
Progressively Karl's violent thoughts and aggressive interactions outside the sessions
became more vividly present in his accounts. He would tell me both about his longing for and
flight from encounters with women. These two aspects - the violence against other men and
the problem of relating to women - seemed to form a pair and he himself could not fail to
acknowledge the simultaneity of these accounts as I consistently pointed them out to him in
sessions. He expressed his fear of me and of my intrusiveness by telling me how he had got
hold of a gun which he was keeping at
216 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1995) 12(2)

home. It was progressively clear that he was holding both of us hostage and terrorized by his
potential destructiveness. He then became so frightened of this violent aspect of himself that
he told me that he had got rid of the gun. This increased his sense of precariousness in
relation to me, and his accounts of criminal activities intensified. He acknowledged that it
was easier for him to come to the sessions after a criminal event, such as when he sold some
stolen diamonds. I suggested that this was because he felt less frightened of my power over
him. He thus found a way of asserting himself and creating a distance from me through
violent and criminal activities.
Karl is a man in his early twenties whose father left his mother when she was pregnant
with him and who describes his relationship with her as very close and special. However, at
the same time, he experiences his mother as unable to tolerate his sexuality or, even less,
him being a man. He said that his mother used to tell him she wished he was gay because
gay people never leave their mothers. His stepfather was violent towards him throughout his
childhood, hitting him frequently around the head. When he was 18 Karl decided to study
martial arts and feels that his father then became frightened of him and stopped hitting him.
Karl has not been able to leave home successfully. When he left for a short period he got
involved in a tremendously violent situation with his peers and a violent relationship with a
girlfriend. I think that he fears that to experience himself is to become imprisoned in an
incestuous world and to succumb to what he experiences as his mother's wishes for him to
have an exclusive relationship with her. The dilemmas for the transference are obvious, and
he attempted to deal with his terror of me by carefully regulating his attendance and
spending the time he was supposed to be in his sessions sleeping a sleep that is profound and
dreamless. In these dreamless states he attempts to find a fusion with a preoedipal idealized
mother and to remove all obstacles in their relationship. If there was an obvious sado-
masochism implied in frequently keeping me waiting, and in the process of letting me know
of the various criminal activities he was engaged in the outside world, I felt that the main
function of all this was not to attack me, but to defend his very survival. His criminal
activities thus served to distance him from me and allowed him to avoid a meaningful
emotional relationship. During the period Karl came to analysis, he was involved with
serious criminals some of whom have gone to prison (one for murder), others have been hurt
in knife fights and, recently, two have committed suicide.
His primal scene phantasies have involved several configurations which included
violence between a man and a woman and also violence between women. We had access to
the violent heterosexual phantasies from the beginnings of his analysis. We were able to
understand his belief that he had been conceived through an act of violence. It was only a
few years into the analysis, however, that we had access to his phantasies of a more
primitive, `all-women' universe. In this later configuration, he was confused about the
difference between the genders and identified himself with a woman. An example of the
danger of this all-women's universe, from which men are excluded, is present in the
following session.
Karl had missed two sessions. When he came back he told me that it had taken him a
few days to realize what had been happening in his mind. On Sunday he had read in the
newspaper about a movement organized by women, from which men were excluded and in
which women participated in sado-masochistic relationships which involved beatings and
mutual torturing. The article had terrified him, and he had not realized why. It was only two
days later that he suddenly realized that he was making a
Thinking about Feelings: Perelberg 217

connection between that women's movement, me and the analysis. Then he had a dream. He
had followed a woman into the toilet and he suddenly realized that her nose was the shape of
a penis. Nevertheless, he tried to get close to her, but was terrified and woke up.
One of the aspects we discussed in that session was his terror of this 'all-women' sado-
masochistic world, the analysis, where men did not have a place. At this point in the analysis
the images and the terrifying experiences have been brought to the centre of the transference
relationship. It is important to observe too that Karl's insight into the process had to take
place while he was absent from a number of sessions. He had needed the distance from me in
order to be able to think although this, at the same time, created a sense of omnipotence that `
he could do it on his own'. It was terribly important for the analyst to tolerate the process and
not take a critical or frustrated stance in relation to his need `to do it by himself
The following clinical vignette illustrates that, for Karl, violence was related to feelings
of need and dependence. The account refers to a childhood memory to which Karl has
progressively more access. At this point in his analysis Karl has more access to his longing
for a feeding analyst/mother who might have been able to protect him against his experience
of the preoedipal idealized mother, his violent self and his father's brutality. There is also an
alternation between an all-feeding mother, on the one hand, and a persecutory object, on the
other.
In this session, two weeks before a summer break, Karl talks about being in a holiday
camp he used to go to but which he hated because he was away from his mother and because
they used to starve the kids there. He was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. He used to be so hungry
that he would steal food at night. He remembered writing to his mother, begging her to bring
food. He said: `She came to visit and I remember seeing her sitting inside the tent; it looked
like a religion, a vision of her sitting there in my tent, with bags and bags of food. The light
inside that tent was eerie'. When she left he felt that he was not ready for it yet. I said: `You
know, when you tell me about starving in the holiday camp and looking forward to your
mother's visit, I think that you are also telling me about your fear of starving during the
break, and that you will be left waiting for me to come back and give you analytic food'. He
said that he had been thinking a great deal about the break. He added that the problem when
his mother left was also that of being left with this sadistic group leader who liked to
humiliate him. He felt that they were laughing at him. I said that I thought that there was a
part of him which felt humiliated for missing his mother/analyst so much. He added that
there was also this incident with his father. He had come to visit him and, because of
something he had done, his father beat his head with a torch in front of everybody. I said that
he felt at times that I beat him with my interpretations and ideas (the torch in his account),
and he felt I was then humiliating him with them, like perhaps now, when I was talking
about his feelings about the break. He said that he could relate to that. He was scared of what
I could say to him. He felt that his mother had never really protected him from his father. He
remembered her taking care of his wounds, but never really being able to stop his father, nor
talk to him about it. His father had stopped beating him when he studied martial arts. I said
that the experience of this mother/analyst alternated as well, between a feeding experience on
the one hand, and one where he experienced me as ineffectual and unable to protect him
against his violent self, on the other. He was afraid that here too he would have to protect
himself on his own.
218 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1995) 12(2)

He remembered the story of a book, The Desert Island, about a group of people stranded
on an island with a tyrannical leader and who end up killing each other. I said that I felt the
island and the holiday camp were expressing his experience of being left by his mother then
or by me now, over the break. He felt that he was being left to this sadistic father/group
leader/tyrannical part of himself who humiliated him by laughing at his needs. (I also noted
the increasing presence of violence in his accounts in the session, as he experienced me
both as feeding him but also `beating him with my torch', i.e. my interpretations, and
pointed this out to him.) He understood and laughed, saying he did not make it easy for me.
I also said that his account in this session reminded me of the previous break, during which
he had got himself involved in so much acted-out violence. He said, `At least this time I can
talk about it before the break!'
The material in this session starts with his account of longing for a feeding mother/
analyst. This mother is also experienced as sadistic, enjoying the humiliation of his needy
self. Her withdrawal or absence is experienced as persecutory. In the sequence of the
session, the alternative to the feelings of need and vulnerability is the tyranny of violence.
There is an alternation between an idealized, all-feeding preoedipal mother, and a
persecutory part of himself which is then projected onto his mother's absence or his father's
presence. The oscillation between the mother's and father's presence is centrally important:
to conceive them as being together leads to potential catastrophe. In the transference Karl
struggles in an impossible attempt to find a space between his feelings of utter vulnerability
on the one hand and his alternative in violence on the other. The sequence in this session has
been recurrent in Karl's analysis although, as he himself points out, he is more able to talk
about it now (for a fuller discussion of this hypothesis, see Perelberg 1995a).

Maria

Maria was in her early forties when she came to analysis. She feels that throughout her
childhood her mother was never available to her, being a withdrawn and cold woman,
unable to show affection either emotionally or physically. Progressively in her analysis we
have gained access to a deep terror of her mother. Maria turned to her father from very early
on, seeking his love and support, but was bitterly hurt by the realization that her mother
always came first for him.
Maria came to analysis because of her inability to form relationships but also presented
several hypochondriac symptoms in various parts of her body which indicated failures in her
capacity to mentalize (see Fonagy 1991). She told me that during the winter prior to coming
to see me she had stayed in bed for six weeks. Her friends had become very worried about
her, thinking that she was depressed, but she said she was actually frozen due to the
coldness in the school where she worked. This concrete bodily experience indicated, from
the outset, my patient's stress on her body as the locus for her experiences. The extended
descriptions of her physiological and physical states became the stuff of which the sessions
were made up for years to come.
During our sessions together, Maria embarked on long and repetitive monologues about
the various pains in the parts of her body. In the second dream she brought to analysis, a
month into treatment, a huge block of concrete suddenly fell on top of three women. The
women were completely flattened and then started to rush about crazily. Maria said it looked
like a cartoon. She said it was a dream but it did not feel like a
Thinking about Feelings: Perelberg 219

dream. She then said that perhaps this was what had happened to her when she was 18 when
she had had a breakdown. In this session we talked about her experience that this had not
felt like a dream because it was so integral to the way she felt - that she had lost her feelings
and her three-dimensionality and had become flattened. It also represented her experience of
feeling disonnected from herself in the present, and her way of relating to me, of flattening
me in the sessions.
On the first two anniversaries of the beginning of her analysis Maria suffered major
accidents, each of which might have killed her. These accidents and the damage she believes
they did to her body, along with the misunderstanding and cruelty with which she felt
treated by the various professionals whom she consulted, constituted the manifest content of
her analysis. Since the accidents Maria has consistently related her various feelings and
experiences to them. I would suggest, however, that the accidents have also expressed
Maria's experience of the analysis itself as a major catastrophe in her life. Bion (1963)
considers that all processes of development inevitably involve catastrophic change. This is a
configuration of circumstances linked together by violence, disorder and invariance. A `new
configuration' or a `new idea' can only appear with disruptive force.
The repetitive quality of her interactions with me and the way she related them to her
accidents were relentless. My patient's sense of being misunderstood and not heard was
profound. She spent most sessions on a raging crusade against almost everybody. The
atmosphere in the sessions for several months following each accident was one of absolute
despair. We both felt for some time in her analysis that she was capable of violent behaviour
against either me or herself. If I said too much, the risk was that she would actually attack
me; if I left her too much on her own she might feel so despairing and abandoned that she
might kill herself.
It was only gradually that we came to understand how this material contained the
externalization of the violence of her internal world. This violence, which she consistently
turned against herself in the battering of her body with her many hypochondriac ailments
and which was externalized in the two accidents she suffered, was frequently close to being
enacted in the consulting-room against me. We have been able to understand these violent
thoughts and impulses as her attempts to regulate a distance in relation to me, whenever she
felt I was too close (being kind to her) or too distant (being cold and unloving). These
thoughts have also expressed her belief that this is what a sexual relationship between a
couple is about.
In one session, for instance, she told me about a film that she had seen the previous day.
It was about twin brothers in the East End of London. They came from a working-class
background and had been very well looked after. Yet they had done terrible things, mugging
people, murdering and raping. It made her feel she was like that because she too came from
this sort of background and yet she also had terrible thoughts. She was shaken by tremors as
she told me this. My response was that she was telling me how frightened she was of having
violent feelings towards me. It was a precarious moment in the session. I thought that she
was also feeling frightened of me - the twin brothers were both violent - and I said that she
was perhaps frightened not only by her own violent feelings but by the fact that I might have
them too. As soon as I said this she started to cry terribly, with great sobs, but progressively
she calmed down.
In the course of Maria's analysis we have been able to understand that the two accidents
she suffered during her treatment were concrete representations of the damage that can
happen in the encounter between two people, of the destructive
220 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1995) 12(2)

violence of the couple. Further confirmation of this was derived both from dreams as well as
from accounts of actual violent encounters. As the analysis progressed, however, it also
became clear that this was her belief about her early relationship with her mother. My
suggestion is that these different time dimensions - the pregenital relationship with the
mother and primal scene - not only became condensed into one in her mind but later became
re-enacted in other relationships. As we have come to understand in her transference to me,
she has had to distance herself from people she loves because of her terror that she might
have to murder them in order not to feel her neediness towards them. It is her own need that
she is ultimately attempting to murder in the violence of her phantasies.

Conclusions

In the analysis of my patients it has been possible to identify the specific points in the
transference where violent thoughts and behaviour occurred. They were, each time, attempts
to create an emotional distance both from their own feelings of terror and in the
relationship with the analyst. My hypothesis is that they relate to a phantasy both about
their primary relationships with their mothers and about their phantasies about the primal
scene (see also Perelberg 1995a, 1995b).
Conceptually, I understand my patients' violence as a defence against an object which is
experienced as terrifying and dangerous, and as an attempt to create an equilibrium where
they do not feel either too separate from or too overwhelmed by this object*. Sandler has
suggested that, in order to preserve its feelings for safety, the ego will make use of whatever
techniques it has at its disposal. I think this principle is helpful in the understanding of
violent behaviour and phantasies in some patients: it can be viewed against the background
of a need for safety, or in the service of the preservation of the psychological self (Fonagy et
al. 1993).
Both these patients feel unable to enter a three-dimensional world, which is experienced
as violent and dangerous, and attempt to retreat into a two-person relationship, which in turn
is also dangerous and engulfing. Both found it difficult to differentiate between their state of
mind and that of the other person, and to think about other people as having separate minds
with their own thoughts and feelings (see Fonagy 1991. This led, in both cases, to a
dehumanization of the other and of themselves. Both retreat into a dehumanized and robotic
world. Karl's initial dreams in his analysis pointed to his experiencing himself as a machine
or a computer involved in dangerous and violent games. Maria experienced herself as
possessing a psychotic body, full of bits that attacked and ached. She attempted to hold
herself together by becoming a piece of concrete, which she then attempted to drop on her
analyst and herself.
Thus violence, for my patients, has represented an attempt to find a refuge from feelings
towards their analyst which they experienced as unbearable. There is a pattern in which
violence is exercised, a narrative, which allows the underlying phantasies to be identified.
These phantasies, for my patients, concerned an imago of an all-

* I am aware that an important difference between these two patients is that Karl has actually been
violent towards other people, whereas Maria has not. Nevertheless, she differs from many other patients
I have had in analysis who have either had violent dreams or expressed conscious violent thoughts
against me in that, at a specific period in her analysis, both Maria and I knew that she was close to
actually attacking me in the consulting-room. Since the beginning of his analysis, Karl has not been as
involved in violence as he had been previously.
Thinking about Feelings: Perelberg 221

engulfing mother and a belief in the primal scene as an act of violence. The violent act or
phantasy tells a story and contains both preoedipal and distorted oedipal theories. The
function of the analytic process is to follow the chains of associations as manifested and
enacted in the transference and to construct this narrative of origins.

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