Hostage in Projective Identification: Will Egalitarian Reframing Survive an Internalized Tyrannical Mother?

Abstract: According to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in his work The Republic , hostages perceive reality only as the shadows cast on a wall behind them, unaware of the world beyond. Similarly, in the analytic setting, patients may remain captive to internalized fantasies and distorted perceptions. This article explores the case of Katerina, a 28-year-old woman struggling with loneliness and social isolation. Growing up with a despotic, tyrannical mother, she experienced her home as a cave-prison and carried this dynamic into the therapeutic relationship. Through the new turn in relational psychoanalysis, dyadic therapy can be viewed as a "large-group" process in which both therapist and analysand represent multiple internalized others, so in this way, we were interacting in a world/room of multiple group attachments. The main challenge in Katerina's treatment was to protect the therapeutic bond from the internalized mother who continued to dominate her psychic life. Katerina was forbidden to express anger toward her parents, unable to recognize the oppression this entailed. Through the emergence of anger within the analytic dyad, both patient and analyst sought to identify and transform internalized bad objects. For the analyst, the task was to resist responding tyrannically to Katerina's projections, avoiding projective identification while acknowledging the unconscious invitation to reenact it. The question persisted: Could I truly see Katerina as herself, despite the intrusion of the tyrannical mother within the therapeutic space? Have we finally managed to find ourselves in a shared, democratically co-created, egalitarian space, or are we trapped in the cave of our projections?