What's a Good Object to Do? - PsyBC

What’s a Good Object to Do 23
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Furthermore, since this organization contains split-off islands of
experience, in which time has collapsed into an eternal, dimensionless
plane, not only do the experiences of the paranoid/schizoid
organization contain no past or future, or paradoxically, both eternal
past and future, there is no communication with other states. The
patient has no awareness that she possesses alternative feelings or
could imagine the possibilities of other feeling perspectives at any point
in time, past or future.
The ahistoricity of a paranoid/schizoid organizational truth requires
that the analyst address his or her empathic attunement to just this
experience. For example, a patient of mine who functioned in a
relatively healthy state of mutuality with me most of the time came to
her session the day following her mother’s death from chronic
alcoholism. I greeted her with an appropriate expression of sympathy.
Instantly flying into a vitriolic spewing of rage at me, she declared
that my sympathy had nothing to do with her, that it was based solely
on my selfish preoccupation with my desire to be liked. I was merely a
“touchy-feely leftover from the 60s.”
So, once again, what’s a good object to do
I wondered, was she right Were my 60s sensibilities, honestly gained
in that decade, appearing in as immature a fashion as they existed
then Was my expression of sympathy formulaic Or did her rage
represent a displacement of her anger toward her mother, who, being
dead, became a more guilt-evoking target Do I empathize with the
patient’s anger Or do I interpret
As I have been arguing, I first discerned that my patient, at that
moment, was ensconced in a paranoid/schizoid organization of self
and other. In that place, she lacked capability to understand an
interpretation, be it transferential, interpersonal, intersubjective, or
whatever. The organization that could process the self-generative
meaning of her experience was split off and unavailable to her. An
interpretation at that moment would have appeared useless at best,
and attacking at worst. Likewise, an empathic response to her affects
would similarly fly out the window. “You’re in a rage at me,” would be
experienced as my lame attempt at stating the obvious.
I maintain that what was needed in the situation was an empathic
communication of the state of her state, the immediate experience of
her paranoid/schizoid way of organizing and enduring her mother’s
death. I offered a statement something like, “It must be terrifying to
trust me one minute and have that trust evaporate entirely the next.