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The psychoanalytical literature has numerous scattered references to the analyst’s experience of boredom, especially amongst writers working with primitive mental states. In the present paper, the author tries to gather some of these references in an attempt to integrate the various facets of this widespread phenomenon, and reflect on some clinical issues and dilemmas it raises. It is suggested that the experience of boredom in analysis may be a reaction to an encounter with a hidden, encapsulated part of the psyche, a bidimensional area of experience in which mental activity has been suspended, and experience remains meaningless. This is a barren area of lack, an encounter with the autistic core of the psyche. However, boredom may also be an experiential expression of despair, a re-living of primitive object relations with an emotionally non-existent primary object. Through bringing the emptiness and desolation into analysis, the individual makes room for the empty, blunt, dead inner object which resides within him, and that needs to be integrated into the psyche. This inner object is a vital part of the patient’s inner world, part of his history, and can neither be erased nor filled in order to eradicate the emptiness. This is illustrated by clinical material from patients along the spectrum of autism, autistic reaction following trauma and autistic barriers in neurotic patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The status of the first invested object at the beginning of psychic life is a complex, scientific, philosophical as well as human enigma. The authors have a vision that is both personal and inspired by the broad metapsychological field and this field has usually been used for a descriptive or even explanatory support for inquiry. The support of their vision is based on a three-part concept, which brings together pictographic representation processes in the sense of “containing”, the reflecting role of the external object and bidimensionality. Their modeling describes the primary object in the form of a psychological experience of nondifferentiation between the constantly evolving subject and his environment, initiated with an originating framework at the beginning of life, which then gradually becomes, and in a way that varies with the individual, the ultimate primary trace. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]