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What happens when the analyst has the impression of being annihilated by the patient? Analysts have a tendency to use more general, i.e. simplifying, constructions such as destructiveness, psychosis or death instinct as explanatory models. In the authors' view, these constructions in the end evade rather than mirror clinical reality. More recent research points to promising possibilities of differentiation, e.g. psychotic mechanisms which are--as yet undiscussed--based on Freud's notion of the partial 'rent in the relation between ego and external world'. These findings emphasize the restitutive function of a symptom or disturbance, i.e. destruction of a relationship which hinders the therapeutic process and which is not understood initially, instead of solely stressing the destructive meaning in a tabooing gesture. The concept of performance attempts to replace simplifying models with a discriminant process, and will be preliminarily defined and explained in delineation to terms already in use such as acting out, enactment, and role responsiveness. The authors explore the question of how the perception of unthought certainty in the performance can either be recognized as a blueprint, i.e. organizing activity, or as the destruction of the relationship so that a new one can emerge. The evidence from a detailed clinical example shows that many treatments can fail at this point and demonstrates how an understanding of performance in this sense offers a chance for integrating processes that otherwise impede treatment.

Using different psychoanalytic points of view, in this comparative study of "Traumnovelle" by Schnitzler and "Eyes Wide Shut" by Kubrick the author analyses the cultural changes between the first and last thirds of the 20th century. This change consists in the way "facts of life" are dealt with. It is a change from identity through insight and understanding to an identity through excited self-objectification. This change proceeds along the lines of "I think therefore I am" to "I feel therefore I am" arriving at "I am excited, therefore I am noticed and thus I am". In the description and illustration of 48 hours in the life of a married couple, this transformation from thinking to feeling and sensing is made tangible. After 9 years of being married, the couple faces the end of their passionate love. They struggle with the primordial anxiety in love life: the traumatic loss of faith in one's capacity to love. This transformation is accompanied by a change in media that symbolizes the couple's experience: from the language of dreaming, reading and listening in Schnitzler to the representation in audiovisual media, i.e. visual art, theatre, movies and public events in Kubrick. It marks a change in the representation of psychic life in space and time.