Thoughts on Dependency, Trust, Perversity and Addiction in the Analytic Relationship

Abstract The author contends that the relation between an individual's inborn potential for true creativity within their mental life and the phenomena that Jung (1960/1969) called “psychic mass destruction” (para. 428) is at the very centre of the analysis of the infantile transference‐countertransference. Within this framework, it can be seen that there are forms of relation to the therapist that may enable psychic growth and development to proceed relatively steadily, if not altogether unopposed. On the other hand, we may encounter in the patient extremes of fear, suspicion and distrust of both the analyst/parent and the psychoanalytic or the truth‐seeking parts (to use Bion's notion) of the patient's personality. I propose that these stem from potentially overwhelming anxieties to do with being lost—through being controlled or devoured or annihilated, wholly or partially—in the early developmental process of making a relation with the object. That may lead to the formation of a psychological system in which what the author calls a “do‐it‐yourself without mother” part of the personality takes a leading role. The author aims to illustrate this “do‐it‐yourself” relation with the object with clinical material.