(2005).

 Psychoanalytic Review, 92(3):355-372

The Obstructive Object

Jeffrey L. Eaton
The concept of an internal object that perpetuates an atmosphere of intense mental pain, violence, and self-
attack is explored in this article. Chronic self-attack, including attacks on linking, blocks the growth of a sense of
personal agency that would ordinarily allow a person to receive help and to cooperate in his or her own
analytic transformation. According to W. R. Bion, some patients give evidence of living with an internal object that
is ego-destructive and that operates as a projective identification rejecting object. Bion names this ego-
destructive internal object an obstructive object.
In the following sections I describe some implications of Bion's obstructive object idea. First I explore the
central theme of learning in Bion's psychology with special attention to the role of projective identification as a form
of communication in earliest life. Next, I review Bion's ideas about the phenomena of an obstructive object. Then, I
sketch an obstructive object scenario as I am currently able to formulate it, offering a brief description from a case.
Finally, I suggest that progress in working with the obstructive object scenario involves the analyst's capacity to
become a projective identification welcoming object that the patient can use interpersonally and ultimately identify
with.

I
Bion's writing can be profitably read as the evolution of twin psychologies: one about the conditions that
sponsor learning and emotional development, and another about the myriad obstructive forces and conditions, both
internal and environmental, that lead to psychological stalemate, breakdown, or malignant
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transformation. A tension between learning (in the widest sense the evolution of the mind) and obstruction to
learning expands from Bion's early group work all the way through his final papers.
The roots of Bion's interest in learning are no doubt to be found in his own autobiography. Such a study is
beyond the scope of this article. However, even as a little boy Bion was a keen observer and a curious child. In his
autobiography, The Long Weekend (1985), there are many moving vignettes about his curiosity, his sensitivity to his
own emotional states as well as to those of others, his confusions over language, and his openness to impressions of
all sorts.
Bion's war experience (beginning as a teenager) is a critical context for understanding the meaning that learning
from experience came to have for him over the remainder of his deeply reflective life. He realized that groups can
become anti-learning assemblages and that failing to learn (indeed failing to think) can be a matter of life and death.
The anti-learning forces observable in groups can also be inferred in the individual personality. What I want to
emphasize is that for Bion the theme of learning is not an academic one. Learning is about emotional experience. It
can be detected in the movement from survival to creativity, from gathered information to personal realization, and
from evacuative reaction to action mediated by reflective thought. Learning involves, in Bion's terms, the
individual's relationship to the very fabric of life itself, attention (or its absence) to the emotional texture of truthful
experience out which wisdom or folly springs.
Bion explicitly distinguishes learning from experience from “learning about.” For example, I may learn
about psychoanalysis by reading books, seeing films, and listening to others who have been in analysis share their
experiences. These experiences allow me to gather information and to form impressions about which I may have
strong feelings. I may even come to believe I know a great deal about psychoanalysis. However, such learning can
in no way substitute for the experience of actually participating in psychoanalysis. These two kinds of knowing give
rise to a personal “language of achievement” in contradistinction to “the language of substitution.” The mind,
according to Bion, only grows
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when nourished by contact with truthfulness. The task of maturation is to grow greater and greater capacity to
explore experience and to become yet more truthful, to distinguish lies, and to make space to recognize the thoughts
that are seeking a thinker. Experience, especially emotional experience, provides the building blocks of the mind.
How does this process of learning from experience take place? Projective identification provides one model of
what sponsors healthy emotional development and learning from experience in earliest life. Extending Klein's work,
Bion introduces the idea of normal projective identification as a form of communication between a baby and his or
her mother (Bion, 1962, p. 37). The infant's facial expressions, vocalizations, crying, and muscular gestures signal
his or her distress. By distress I mean something familiar: raw emotional experience at the level of sensation that
obtrudes upon the infant's attention or awareness. This obtrusion may be of such intensity that it saturates the infant's
experience through states of sensory-dominated arousal. Bion gives this familiar human experience a very abstract
name. He calls such primitive sensory or emotional distress “beta elements” (Bion, 1962, p. 6) According to
Bion, beta elements are suitable only to be projected, or, as he says, evacuated. This word— evacuated—speaks to
force and intensity.
What is the fate of evacuated distress? Put more simply, what is the fate of the infant's cry of pain? In order for
distress to be transformed, Bion suggests that it must find a home in the mind of another. Ideally a mind can be
found to register the infant's pain. Still more important, that mind should belong to an individual more emotionally
mature—someone with more experience of tolerating distress than the infant. If this is so, then pain can be more
than registered, it can be recognized, reflected upon, and replied to creatively and compassionately.
Bion asks the question: What does this other mind do for the infant in distress? Something helps the experience
of raw emotional distress become an opportunity to evolve in the direction of discovering meaning. Bion says this
something that helps is called “alpha function.” The discovery of meaning depends upon the mother's ability to use
her mind, including her attention, intuition, and emotional experience (all factors in her alpha
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function) to contain her infant's distress (the beta elements) and to transform that distress imaginatively.
In Bion's abstract formulation beta elements are transformed into alpha elements. Alpha elements are, according
to Bion, the building blocks of memory, dreams, and reflective awareness. The capacity to learn from
experience (Bion, 1962) depends upon the growing ability to transform beta elements into alpha elements.
This transformation is sponsored as the infant internalizes and identifies with the mother as
a containing object capable of alpha function.
According to Bion, an infant is dependent upon the actual separate mind of another in a particular way. The
infant's needs for food, safety, proximity, and for concrete care may be adequately provided for. Bion highlights
another dimension of experience that he feels is an essential factor in the evolution of the infant's mind. An infant
also depends upon the quality of mother's attention, and her capacity for reverie as a factor in alpha function. In
short, the infant depends upon the unique qualities of the mother's own internal object world expressed through the
quality of her interactions with her baby. The quality of mother's emotional presence helps her infant's mind to be
born and to grow emotionally.
A mother sponsors the essential experience of transformation from beta to alpha, from distress to comfort,
repeatedly. She picks her baby up, rocks him or her, sings to the baby, and speaks aloud about what might be
troubling her infant. She allows her infant to disengage when overstimulated, and she reengages her infant when the
latter's gestures signal the desire to reconnect. The successful transformation of distress to comfort makes play and
exploration possible. In essence, the mother uses her own intuition, unconscious memory of her own care as a child,
and her emotional availability in the moment to investigate the experience of her infant and to reply to it.
According to Bion, the capacity to learn from experience is characterized, in particular, by an ability to tolerate
and transform rather than to evade the inevitable turbulence and frustration of uncertain and painful situations. It
also involves a faith that in states of distress, including even acute distress, one will not become totally trapped in an
atmosphere of emotional catastrophe.
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Instead, this faith, based on the accumulated memories of the mother's repeated capacity to receive and transform
distress into comfort, promotes a capacity for personal reverie, that is, a reverie for one's own experience as it arises
and is lived through. This capacity for personal reverie can be pictured as the self able to turn toward and rely
upon internal projective identification welcoming objects that can bear the turbulence of a new experience and can
sponsor openness toward learning and exploration. The capacity for transformation from distress to comfort is the
basis for motivated initiative. It requires continued rejuvenation, from both internal and external support, and must
be widened, expanded, and continually consolidated as new experiences pressure the mind to grow.

II
By observing the phenomena of the obstructive object a model can be developed for why learning from
experience seems nearly impossible for some people. Bion (1993) introduces the term “obstructive object” in his
“schizophrenia” papers, particularly in “On Arrogance” and “Theory of Thinking.” These papers, along with
“Attacks on Linking” form the background for several passages from Learning from Experience that describe the
consequences not only of a failure of maternal reverie and absent or inadequate alpha function, but also of the
important variables of an excess of envy as well as very low frustration tolerance in the infant. Such a constellation
of factors can contribute to severe vulnerability in the mother—infant dyad. Such vulnerability may inhibit or
obstruct the development of the container/contained relationship over time and make faith in the
reliable transformation of distress to comfort impossible to realize.
The roots of the obstructive object are to be found in Klein's work on splitting and the paranoid-schizoid
position. Klein focuses on the development of psychic reality through the mechanisms of introjection and projection.
According to Buckingham (2002), Klein theorized that
Infants with an inherently low tolerance of frustration are likely to have phantasies of a bad,
denying breast and will experience sadistic, attacking impulses towards it. This sets in train a
negative
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cycle: fears of retribution, introjection of a bad, damaged breast, feelings of persecution which are

projected back into the breast, and so on. Early disjunction between mother and baby can set in even
if the mother is doing her best to counteract the baby's anxiety. Another baby, with high tolerance
of frustration, may thus fare better under worse external circumstances, although a baby
whose mother is not in touch with her needs will suffer. (p. 107)
A close reading of Bion finds him extending Klein's work and carefully addressing the intersection of
interpersonal and intrapsychic variables that may give rise to situations that he names infantile
catastrophe and nameless dread. Bion suggests that for some patients distress is never reliably transformed and that
dire consequences follow.
In “Attacks on Linking” (Bion, 1993) Bion writes:
Projective identification makes it possible for him to investigate his own feelings in
a personality powerful enough to contain them. Denial of the use of this mechanism, either by the
refusal of the mother to serve as a repository for the infant's feelings, or by the hatred and envy of the
patient who cannot allow the mother to exercise this function, leads to a destruction of the link
between infant and breast and consequently to a severe disorder of the impulse to be curious on
which all learning depends [emphasis added]. The way is therefore prepared for a severe arrest
of development. Furthermore, thanks to a denial of the main method open to the infant for dealing
with his too powerful emotions, the conduct of emotional life, in any case a severe problem, becomes
intolerable. Feelings of hatred are thereupon directed against all emotions including hate itself, and
against external reality which stimulates them. It is a short step from hatred of the emotions to hatred
of life itself. (pp. 106-107)
Here Bion is going a step beyond either Freud or Klein. Instead of posing the individual's main conflict as
arising between reality and fantasy or between love and hate or between the life instincts and the death instinct, Bion
describes how some patients are faced with a choice between emotion and antiemotion. In the absence of
maternal reverie or in the presence of excessive envy or frustration, hatred is directed toward emotional experience
itself.
A critical feature of the obstructive object relationship is that the person feels overwhelmed by emotional
experience. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (1981), one meaning
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of distress is “the condition of being in need of immediate assistance.” This definition seems to capture the
experience of the infant who feels a desperate urgency for relief when raw emotional experience (beta elements)
obtrudes upon awareness. Bion writes (1977): “If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious,
there can be no repression, suppression, or learning. This creates the impression that the patient is incapable of
discrimination. He cannot be unaware of any single sensory stimulus: yet such hypersensitivity is not contact
with reality” (p. 8).
It is at this very moment of distress and vulnerability that a containing object is so desperately needed. What
kind of object will be there to greet the infant's distress? The obstructive object, as defined by Bion, is
overwhelming in a quite particular way. An obstructive object is a projective identification rejecting object that has
been internalized. Bion (1993) notes: “The (infant's) rudimentary consciousness cannot carry the burden placed
upon it (by the experience of uncontained distress). The establishment of a projective-identification-rejecting-
object means that instead of an understanding object the infant has a willfully misunderstanding object—with which
it is identified” (p. 117).
I want to unpack Bion's condensed language and try to bring closer to home what I think he intends to describe.
What does a projective identification rejecting object look like and feel like? In infant observation or in clinical
work with mothers and infants one can sometimes painfully observe the interpersonal origins of the
obstructive object. Imagine, for example, an infant crying in her crib. Mother for some reason cannot bear her baby's
crying. She does not pick her baby up and try to soothe her. Instead, she leaves the room, perhaps shutting the door
to muffle her baby's cries. This is a literal description of a scenario where the baby's distress is rejected. Bion
suggests that this sort of scenario leaves the baby in a state of potentially unmodified distress. Drawing on the
experience of infant observation I can speculate about the sorts of experiences that a baby might have after
its projective identification of distress has been rejected. Suppose that one could observe this baby now left alone in
its crib. Perhaps the infant will cry until exhausted and then “withdraw” into sleep. Perhaps she will adhesively
identify with a pattern
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on the curtain or a shadow on the wall as a way of fixing her attention and subjectively pulling herself together.
Perhaps we can imagine her finding her thumb, putting it into her mouth, sucking, and in this way gradually
calming. Perhaps she will become muscularly tense and rigid, curling her toes, making her fingers into fists,
stiffening her neck and arching her back, and finally settling into a different state. Now imagine that this scenario is
repeated many times over several weeks or months without variation. A great deal depends, of course, on the
complexity of the patterns of communication and rejection that are unfolding, evolving, or reifying
between mother and baby over time. Somehow these patterns become unconsciously represented by both partners in
terms of unconscious relational expectations (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002).
It is from a scenario of this sort that one can begin to appreciate what an obstructive object scenario looks like
and feels like. My contention is that an obstructive object scenario is a more extreme and chronic outcome of the
repeated experience of meeting the other as a projective identification rejecting object. I want to be clear that I think
the creation of the obstructive object scenario involves vulnerability at both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal
levels of experience. This scenario takes different forms with varying intensities for different patients. For the sake
of brevity I want to simplify the situation to its essentials. The obstructive object relationship, according to Bion, is
“willfully misunderstanding.” I am interested in conveying the feel of this kind of “link.”
Imagine, now, a mother who cannot stand her infant's crying. She feels, for her own unconscious reasons, that
her infant is doing something to her by crying out in distress. This mother cannot bear what feels too overwhelming.
She screams at her infant to shut up. Maybe she shakes her infant to silence her. In the worst of all scenarios she
suffocates her infant with a pillow to silence her. An obstructive object is experienced as someone or something
actively hostile toward emotional experience, creating an atmosphere of escalating pressure and violence. Though it
is beyond the scope of this article to describe, it is my experience that the obstructive object scenario is created anew
again and again over generations.
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Another way to picture the obstructive object is by turning to myth. For example, following Bion, the figure of
the Sphinx is emblematic of an obstructive object. When we remember the Sphinx we remember a monster. She is
part woman, part lion, and part bird. We also remember her riddle. What is much more important than the content of
her riddle, however, is the emotionally violent atmosphere evoked when the Sphinx stops Oedipus from continuing
on his journey. There is an atmosphere of intense threat, confusion, and hatred. The Sphinx is not felt to be asking
riddles playfully, or in the service of learning, but in a bizarre and violent manner, as weapons to attack links
and thinking.
Recall the images from the Oedipus myth. The Sphinx blocks the road to Thebes, stopping everyone who
wishes to enter. She demands that they answer a riddle in order to pass. She threatens people by saying that if they
answer her wrongly they will die. The obstructive object sponsors an atmosphere of confusion and terror.
The subject is faced with a unconscious choice between omnipotence or helpless collapse. This dire choice is
symbolized by the Sphinx's own suicide when Oedipus guesses a plausible answer to the riddle. One is left in an
atmosphere of horror.
With these images in mind one can begin to observe a certain category of phenomena in the consulting room
that superficially appear to be motivated by destructive impulses. It is very important to differentiate the
consequences of violent projections, which are, indeed, often destructive, from their motivation, which may be very
different. The intensity and pervasiveness of some forms of violent projection may be part of an unconsciously
frantic search for a helping object that can transform pain and distress into comfort. If relief is not adequately
found, the violence of the projection intensifies. Such constant and intense projections then may serve multiple
simultaneous functions. The projection may serve to rid pain through evacuation; it may serve to communicate
distress still more emphatically; it may serve to try to control an object through an invasive fantasy, what Klein
originally called excessive projective identification. Or it may serve to destroy the mental apparatus through a
process described by Bion as “attacks on links.” Since none of these functions can
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lead to an adequate transformation of distress into comfort, the self is faced with overwhelming emotional
experiences that over time produce an atmosphere of intense, ego-destructive dread.
Bion (1993) gives this description from his own clinical work in his essay “Attacks on Linking”:
Associations from a period in the analysis… showed an increasing intensity of emotions in the
patient. This originated in what he felt was my refusal to accept parts of his personality.
Consequently he strove to force them into me with increased desperation and violence. His
behaviour, isolated from the context of the analysis, might have appeared to be an expression
of primary aggression. The more violent his phantasies of projective identification, the more
frightened he became of me. There were sessions in which such behaviour expressed
unprovoked aggression, but I quote this… because it shows the patient in a different light, his
violence a reaction to what he felt was my hostile defensiveness. (p. 104)

III
Over the past several years I have tried to observe what might be called an obstructive object scenario in my
clinical work with children and adults. One feature I have noticed is the phenomenon of constant and
intense projection as a crucial function in perpetuating the overwhelming aspect of the obstructive object. Often we
think of projective identification arising as a discrete response to an overwhelmingly intense experience. However,
in my experience, some patients rely upon a kind of pervasive projective identification. Because distress cannot be
transformed into comfort, some people act as if their minds have become machines for evacuation. Constant and
intense projections blur the already tenuous boundary between self and other. This pervasive projection creates an
atmosphere of confusion, hostility, and agitated frustration because intense distress is felt to be always already
present everywhere.
I have learned much about the obstructive object scenario by working with a patient I here call Paula. Paula is a
middle-aged woman who feels unable to sustain a loving sexual relationship with a man over time. She feels unable
to complete her professional and educational ambitions, and unable to earn a satisfactory
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income. She is highly intelligent but blocked in her capacity to learn from experience. She says she has no
confidence in herself. Until recently she had given little thought to her future.
Upon entering analysis Paula characterized her daily experience as “scattered,” “foggy,” and “dreamlike.” Now,
nearly four years into our work together, she is able to observe how she “constantly distracts herself from
the moment.” She now reports finding some sense of being able to “be clear” and “to think straight.” Paula still
seems to oscillate between states of hyperarousal (sometimes reaching a level of panic) and hypoarousal (feeling
exhausted, depressed, and sometimes overwhelmed with despair). She is still often exhausted by what feels to her
like an unrelenting, assaulting present from which she cannot escape.
Paula's early sessions were filled with fragmented descriptions of her feelings of deep rage and disturbance
about the many atrocities occurring throughout the world. Paula seemed to repeat the same fragmented stories, often
in detail, as if she had never seen me before or as if she could not believe I was listening to her or remembering our
meetings.
Very quickly I began to wonder if Paula could listen to me. Things I said seemed to be willfully ignored. Paula
felt intensely disturbed by what she said was evidence of the corruption of the Bush administration. She also felt
persecuted by the men in charge at her workplace. I understood these complaints at one level as a gathering of
the transference, but Paula rejected transference interpretations as formulaic and “psychoanalytic bullshit.” Paula
insisted on the merit of her concrete concerns, especially of the shared social situation we were both living through.
I often felt intimidated, rejected, angry, and exhausted in the face of Paula's tirades. Her seeming unwillingness
to accept my sincere attempts at understanding began to wear me down day after day. Over time she became worried
that I could not see or acknowledge her worries about “the real world.” She implied that I was the one who needed
analysis and that I was ill because I could not acknowledge reality.
Eventually I began to recognize that Paula might unconsciously experience every emotional relationship as an
obstructive object scenario. I began to discern that I might be enacting a role that seemed to feel to Paula like
a projective identification
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rejecting object. Through self-analysis and supervision I tried to open up my way of thinking about and being with

Paula in order to be more at-one with her picture of the world. I realized that Paula seemed to believe that I was a
willfully misunderstanding object trying to force my illness into her.
With many patients I often experience a greater or lesser degree of what I regard as reverie. By reverie I mean
an openness and freedom to listen to myself listening to the patient (Grotstein, personal communication, 2003). In
any given session the emotional experience of being with a patient may evoke sensations, images, memories,
reflections, or sudden intuitive “hunches” that can become part of the material that eventually forms
an interpretation. The capacity for reverie sponsors a kind of inquiry into and spontaneous description of the
emotional field arising between patient and analyst in the moment. With Paula I felt little freedom to speak, much
less to dream the session. I felt little freedom to let my mind relax, wander, or play. Instead, I often felt “on the edge
of my seat” (sometimes literally) because of the tension in the room. I expected Paula to explode, and sometimes she
did.
The question, I think, that faced me with Paula was how to be in two places simultaneously. Paula seemed to
regard me as the embodiment of an willfully misunderstanding object, amplifying her distress with my apparently
cruel and stupid interpretations. I had to find some way to accept this reality in the transference. At the same time, I
began to ask myself how I could become the opposite of an obstructive object, a projective
identification welcoming object. How could I do this in a way that would feel real to Paula? How could I find a
place in myself where I could tolerate the distress aroused in me by being with Paula? I had to try to find my way
toward my own projective identification welcoming objects in order to tolerate, contain, and transform my own
significant distress so that a space of reverie might become tenuously possible. I intend to offer a fuller description
of this process in a future articles. For now, I think the key point is the idea that working through in
the countertransference involves repeatedly reestablishing and contacting the vitality of one's own projective
identification welcoming objects rather than giving in to the temptation to “slam the door”
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on the potential of living through and transforming both the analyst's and the patient's distress. Each of us has to find
our own ways, through experience, to make this kind of opening up to pain possible. The personal obstacles to
allowing this kind of development can be significant indeed.

IV
How does an infant realize a mother's reverie? I suggest that the mother in reverie helps to facilitate
a transformation that in its most primitive form is subjectively registered by the infant as moving from bodily
distress to bodily comfort. In the actual beginning of the infant's life, the transformation from beta elements to alpha
elements involves a feeling of somatic relief. Before the infant has the capacity to represent this transformation in
organized images, I suggest that the infant experiences the “shape” of this transformation in bodily experiences
of calming and relaxation. The capacity of the infant to become calm after a state of anxious arousal is, I suggest,
one of the earliest and most important transformations repeatedly facilitated by a mother in reverie. It may be that
this first transformation is already developing in fetal life. Whenever it occurs, I name this transformation,
descriptively, a transformation from distress to comfort.
An infant able to receive and use a mother's reverie is able gradually to experience psychical qualities, whereas
an infant for some reason deprived of the benefit of reverie may remain trapped within the intensity and
concreteness of distress. A projective identification welcoming object promotes the recognition of psychical
experience and a space for thinking, while a projective identification rejecting object leads to a denial, even hatred
of psychic reality. A projective identification welcoming object is the basis for the establishment of the evolving
relationship between container and contained that promotes the transformation of distress to comfort.
The mother's capacity for reverie and her ability to lend her alpha function to her infant's state of distress is a
comfort that strengthens her infant's developing mind through the creation of alpha elements that eventually make
the comprehension of meaningful emotional experience possible. The provision of alpha
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function provides not only relief, but the possibility of a new experience, a novel and evolving relationship to
distress that over the process of maturation becomes represented in more and more sophisticated ways. Also at stake
is the fate of attention. The infant trapped in distress dissociates its attention from more and more experience, while
an infant capable of the transformation from distress to comfort establishes a curious link to other objects and is free
to explore experience.
My challenge was to find a way to make real for Paula the experience of this earliest transformation from
distress to comfort in order to help her mind to grow free to learn from emotional experience. Somehow, as I have
said, I had to free my own mind to allow more room for observation, reverie, play, and exploration. So, what did I
do? First, I began to slow down, to say less, and to try to be at-one with Paula's experience rather than trying to
describe something about the transference between us. This seemed to help. Gradually the atmosphere of the
sessions began to change. Paula's complaints came nearer to home, and focused upon her parents and siblings. Why
should this be so? It seems to me that I was literally making space for Paula's distress to exist, in her, within me, and
between us. Before it could be transformed, spaces had to be discovered where her distress could be tolerated.
During this time Paula began to describe that she could feel her distress was really registered by me and that this felt
like a disorientingly new experience.
Over time, Paula began to bring more dreams. Some of her dreams were horrific. Her dreams began
to picture intensely shaming objects, both male and female. These objects were not only willfully misunderstanding,
but creul and annihilating. My sense is that our work allowed the obstructive object to begin to take shape in
her dream life so that we could begin to face it together. For reasons of confidentiality I am not reporting
Paula's dreams. However, I will share the dream of another patient because it so beautifully pictures the movement
from the domination of the obstructive object to the tentative discovery of a projective
identification welcoming object:
A small figure approaches a larger figure. The small figure carries in her arms a large red-hot burning
coal. The coal has burned
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away the hands and arms of the small figure up to the elbows. The small figure desperately wants to
pass the coal to the larger figure but is afraid of injuring the larger figure and of how the larger figure
will react.
This dream poignantly illustrates the awakening of a search for a projective identification welcoming object.
This dream beautifully pictures the experience of raw emotional distress. The red-hot coal represents emotional
intensity that is too searing to bear. A passage from John Lampen (1987), a Quaker essayist, gives imaginative
voice to the small figure of this dream. This is the sort of thing I think patients can begin to put into words when
they feel in touch with a projective identification welcoming object:
I need you to take this great lump of pain which I feel…I want you to look at it, and feel it, and think
about it. Perhaps you can blunt some of its edges, soften it a little with your tears, or throw it up in the
air and catch it to show me it is not so heavy as I thought. Perhaps you can take a measure and show
me its proper size. Perhaps you could just hold it a little, while I get back on my feet again. But then
you should give it back to me, because it is my load and my task. You may carry away a little of the
poison, but the real task of making it safe can only be done by me. (p. 29)
The discovery of a projective identification welcoming object sponsors the yearning to live and experience and
to learn despite intense suffering. Paula has begun to express a tentative but powerful sense of being in love with
love. This love is so fragile and so painful that it hurts to acknowledge it. She describes not only being terrified of an
objectively dangerous and brutal world outside, but, even more to the point, of a loss of the sense of emerging
preciousness of experience when the old persecutory relationship within herself reappears. All of Paula's critiques of
“the real world” apparently serve as screens to deflect our attention from her terrible anxiety of being someone who
hates and fears her own emotional experience while at the same time desperately yearning to be more open to
experience.
Paula's sense of humor has been of immense help to us both. She has a kind of gallows humor that makes space
to face the immense pain of her life. She has begun to be interested in
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spiritual questions and even begun to wonder about the meaning of her life in ways that she had never engaged
before. Analysis seems to be helping Paula to begin to symbolize her experience, particularly the presence of the
cruel obstructive object. Recognizing and facing this cruel obstructive object seems sometimes unbearably
intimidating. What has been especially important to us both has been the growing capacity for compassion that
seems to arise as space is made to observe and describe the ways that Paula's psychic reality is structured around
approaching and withdrawing from the violent internal projective identification rejecting object. The more that I can
clearly and emotionally describe this situation, the more I gradually earn Paula's tentative trust. We have both begun
to experience a kind of living through hell together. It seems that I must experience the feelings of rage, frustration,
hopelessness, and helplessness that emerge while trying to think and experience in the presence of an
obstructive object. Being more at-one with Paula's experience is necessary in order to really begin to find words that
feel truthful to her and that can hold her attention and reorient her to a new kind of relationship.

Concluding Thoughts
This article has suggested that one of the most painful situations in analytic work involves the
obstructive object relationship first described by Bion. The practical task of psychoanalysis is to identify, describe,
and over time to transform the unconscious modes of coping with pain that were learned very early in life and that
can be observed in transferences into the present. Our task is to learn to describe (and in doing so, contain and bring
awareness to) the shifting levels of pain and anxiety that the patient experiences, moment to moment and session to
session. Over time, the mindfulness and reverie that we demonstrate for our patient is internalized and becomes part
of the patient's own projective identification welcoming object world. These more creative internal
object relationships can be increasingly relied upon to sponsor learning from experience over the course of a
lifetime.
There are particular challenges in working with obstructive
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object scenarios. Patients block introjection of the therapist's alpha function because of their own

pervasive projective identification. They anticipate rejection and attack because they are identified with an ego-
destructive internal object. The analyst has the large challenge of bearing the strain of the Sphinx-like encounter
with terror and dread that the patient experiences upon emerging into an obstructive object transference that often
has been deeply split off and denied. By avoiding the trap of concretely enacting a projective identification rejecting
object, the analyst, through actual reverie and presence with the patient, gives the patient an experience that
stimulates his or her own alpha function and in the best situations allows mourning and the working through of
depressive anxieties to take place. This sponsors the reclamation of attention and thwarted life instincts that may
now revive and expand by relying upon the new experience of a projective identification welcoming object and a
sense of relationship to one's own internal world. Through successful analytic work one can observe how the patient
withdraws his or her projections from external objects back into himor herself and his or her internal objects. This
process happens as the patient begins to discover the analyst as a containing object, one who welcomes projective
identifications rather than rejecting them, as anticipated by the patient.
Acknowledgments
Several people have read and commented on this article as it was being written. I am grateful to each of them.
Paul Cooper, Mike Eigen, and Robert Oelsner made extensive and helpful comments to the final drafts.

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Bion, W. R. (1985). The long weekend: Part of a life and all my sins remembered. London: Karnac.
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