“Ghosts at the banquet” - Scholarly Commons Home

According to Klein (1953):
The breast and its product, which first gratify his [sic] self-preservative
instinct as well as his sexual desires, come to stand in his mind for love,
pleasure and security. The extent to which he is psychologically able to
replace this first food by other foods is therefore a matter of supreme
importance (p.90)
It is interesting to note that in my search around anorexia and
deadness/aliveness and countertransference, Klein’s work per se did not
appear amongst the article searches. However, her reference to the death
instinct and psychic development was referred to by other authors and
researchers. I point to this because Klein’s theories are not in the foreground of
the literature as might be thought obvious in this dissertation.
The unspoken anxiety of being annihilated has been an area of exploration for
many psychoanalytic writers. Farber (1997), Grotstein (1993), Krueger (2002),
and Tustin (1990), refer to the fear of losing one’s self, of being engulfed,
abandoned, devoured, penetrated, or mutilated as an overwhelming terror of
falling into a terrible black hole. Bion (1970) was the first psychoanalyst to
describe the “infantile catastrophe” as a “black hole” such as described in
astrophysical terms, where a set of events causes a massive collapse of a dying
star. “Everything is dragged back by the gravitational field, producing a region
of space-time where infinitely strong gravitational forces literally squeeze
matter and photons out of existence” (Penrose, 1973, cited in Gribbin, 1992, p.
142). Hurvich (2005) considers annihilation anxiety as central in the
development and maintenance of severe pathology. Likewise, Modell (1994)
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