The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas (1987)

“Who is speaking?” Paula Heimann of the British School changed psychoanalysis when she thought to ask this question when an analysand was free associating, her assumption being that “at any one moment in a session a patient could be speaking with the voice of the mother, or the mood of the father.” Margaret Little further changed psychoanalysis by saying that the analyst should be asking what she herself is feeling, her assumption being that the countertransference, her point being that “the analysand uses the analyst as an object in the transference in order to put the analyst into the patient’s mind, compelling the analyst to relive with the analysand the nature of the patient’s early life and to exist with some feeling inside his internal object world.”

“The work of a clinical psychoanalysis, particularly of object relations in the transference and countertransference, will partly be preoccupied with the emergence into thought of early memories of being and relating. As exploration of this feature of psychoanalysis, of the reliving through language of that which is known but not yet thought (what I term the unthought known), is the subject of this book.”

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