The Analyst’s Disappointment

The Metapsychological Function of Disappointment

Disappointment bears a close relationship to both frustration and loss. Freud based his theory of the hallucination of the breast on the infant’s need to create an alternative that would help him survive not having access to the breast when he desires and needs it. As Freud (1911) states, the “momentous step” of setting up the reality principle finds its explanation in that need: “It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. . . . A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable” (p. 219; emphasis added).

According to Klein (1945) the search for new sources of gratification is supported by the forward movement of the libido, as well as by the infant’s gratification at the mother’s breast. This enables the infant to turn to new objects, first of all toward the father’s penis and then the father: “Particular impetus, however, is given to the new desire by frustration in the breast relation” (p. 408).

Klein holds that these two conflicting attitudes to the mother’s breast are carried over into the new relation to the father’s penis and that the “frustration suffered in the early relation increases the demands and hopes from the new source and stimulates love for the new object. The inevitable disappointment in the new relation reinforces the pull back to the first object; and this contributes to the lability and fluidity of emotional attitudes and of stages of the libidinal organization” (p. 408).

Influenced by ideas presented by Freud in ‘Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911), Bion (1962b) developed his own theory of thinking based on the infant’s need to tolerate frustration sufficiently to develop a capacity to think instead of evacuating and evading it: “I shall limit the term ‘thought’ to the mating of a pre-conception with a frustration. The model I propose is that of an infant whose expectation of a breast is mated with a realization of no breast available for satisfaction. This mating is experienced as a no-breast, or ‘absent’ breast inside. . . . If the capacity for toleration of frustration is sufficient the ‘no-breast’ inside becomes a thought, and an apparatus for ‘thinking’ it develops” (p. 307).

Bion’s innovation was to propose that projective identification is not just a defensive process the infant uses to deal with anxieties of annihilation, to get rid of an excess of unprocessed sense-data, and to control the object (Bion 1962c), but a primitive form of thinking. Bion believed projective identification is the basis on which unconscious communication between mother and infant is established; it is both an emotional experience and an unconscious activity on the part of the mother. “Another important point is that if the mother cannot tolerate these projections the infant is reduced to continued projective identification carried out with increasing force and frequency” (p. 115).

This process therefore requires a receptive mother who not only can tolerate the manifestation of inchoate emotional experiences and raw sense impressions (which Bion called beta elements) but who can also be lovingly accepting of these projections, even when they bring anxiety. I think this requires a mother who can tolerate a rejecting baby, a baby who cannot always be calmed down and does not immediately reward the mother’s efforts of care. The mother’s reverie is fundamental for the infant to be able to transform raw sense impressions into alpha elements that can be used to form dream-thoughts. In this way the baby can develop a capacity to think and “bridge the gap between sense-data and appreciation of sense-data,” rather than just evacuate and evade psychic pain (Bion 1962c, p. 117). The mother’s containing capacity depends on her own internal resources, as well as on the emotional support she gets from without.

It seems important to mention here the relevance of the mother’s capacity to contain and process not just the potential meaning of the infant’s unformed communications but also their intensity (Bronstein 2015). Containing the intensity of disappointment and being able to work through it depends on the secure establishment of an internalized good object (Bronstein 2001). However, given that frustration depends on internal factors as well as on actual experiences, there is no simple explanation to account for the difficulties an infant might have in dealing with disappointment.

“Ordinary” and Occasional Disappointment

I would like to call “ordinary” the disappointment in psychoanalytic practice that stems from our occasional “failures,” including enactments that arise from insufficient understanding of what is happening in a session or our incapacity to provide adequate containment for the patient’s projections and/or contain our own anxiety. There are innumerable reasons for these situations to arise: an occasional enactment on the part of the analyst, a reaction to a patient who is caught up in a particularly powerful negative transference, other preoccupations interfering with the analyst’s capacity to think, the patient’s not appreciating the analyst’s “goodness,” the analyst’s suddenly forgetting the patient’s son’s name, etc. Calling these disappontments “ordinary” does not mean they don’t carry consequences or should not be examined in detail, as they are intrinsic to any analytic encounter. There is a sense of mobility attached to this type of disappointment, because even though we may feel pain, guilt, and discomfort about what we have said or done, we also feel that we can recover from it, and that our analytic capacity and self-esteem, though momentarily dented, has not been destroyed.

With disappointment, as with any other feeling arising in a session, the analyst attempts to identify and distinguish between what stems from her personal experience and what is the consequence of the patient’s projection. Because we want to help our patients, it is easy to understand our disappointment when we don’t succeed in doing this. There are many instances when we don’t understand what is happening in the analysis and, unable to contain our anxiety, we act out in various ways. Having to grapple with the negative consequences of sudden or premature interpretations can be painful. Despite wishing to be good containers, ¹ we are sometimes unable to provide this function.

For example, I treated a young girl named Annie who suffered from severe asthma and eczema (Bronstein 2014). I knew that she was very sensitive to feeling rejected. She always sought some type of physical contact with me, mediated by her skin. This seemed the only way she could be reassured that she was accepted and wanted. She had also expressed her wish to have my skin, and frequently spoke of her hatred of her own skin. In a session that coincided with her ninth birthday, Annie looked at me while scratching furiously. “Is my skin dry?” she asked. I remember feeling the intensity of her gaze and longing. I felt uncomfortable, intruded upon, and quickly interpreted that she wanted me to know how her skin felt, implying that it was her skin and not mine. In other words, “How could I know how your skin feels?” A little later in the session she had an asthma attack.

I believe my interpretation confirmed Annie’s fear that I was tearing myself away from her, rejecting not just her skin but also her self. I felt worried and guilty, and also very disappointed that in my need to separate from her I could not contain the projection of her intense need and longing to be “in my skin.” I think she desperately needed to merge with my skin in order not to be herself, to have to carry unbearable feelings of pain, rage, and sadness connected to her birth (she had been “rescued” from her schizophrenic mother, had not seen her in a long time, and did not know who her father was). Annie needed to disown and project her “dry” and unwanted skin-thoughts/feelings into me, partly to get rid of them but also so that I would know what her skin/mind was feeling. My containing this would probably have been felt by her as a protection from having to carry the “mad” and dangerous maternal skin—that is, from an identification with a dangerous maternal object. However, I believe my interpretation must have felt like a rejection of her projections. Her scratching intensified, and shortly afterward she had an asthma attack. Later, reflecting that I had been too precipitate in my interpretation, I had to process my guilt and preoccupation for her welfare as I debated whether to summon medical assistance. I felt that I needed to remain calm and overcome my disappointment and guilt. What seemed crucial at this point was to help her survive her psychophysical state. My concern for her helped me overcome my frustration with myself, and once she had recovered from the attack we were able to identify and verbalize her anger toward me, and the sadness connected to her birthday.

It would be difficult to enumerate the various actions that can make analysts feel disappointed in themselves. Certainly not being a good container for the patient’s anxieties, not understanding what is happening, failing to provide a stable frame, and allowing personal conflicts to intrude are often sources of disappointment. How strongly analysts feel these disappointments depends on their ego ideal and the expectations they place on themselves, as well as the changes they observe in their patients. I think we all need to address the question, What is the aim of psychoanalytic treatment? It may help us to remember that the central factor, the primary aim of psychoanalysis, is to help the patient gain insight, ² “to know.” And this may be very different from a particular therapeutic goal. Bion’s idea that the analyst should be present in the session “without memory or desire” may itself become an internal demand. We do have desires relating to change and “cure,” but we need to ask what impact these internal demands have on our patients.

Pervasive Disappointment: Whose?

“I feel I am floating in the air . . . I feel dead.”

I would like to examine a situation that arises in certain cases when the experience of feeling disappointed becomes pervasive and ever present rather than temporary. I would venture the hypothesis that a prevailing sense of disappointment may indicate the living out in the transference of an early object relationship (phantasized ³ or real) in which the feeling of disappointment between mother and infant does not just predominate, but in fact binds them together, suffocating development and separateness. I am using this construction very tentatively, as I don’t think we can ever gain real access to the patient’s history. We have access only to the patient’s psychic reality, to unconscious phantasies about his or her objects, as they become enacted and lived out in the transference relationship.

In the case of Ms. D.’s analysis, her feelings of disappointment evoked a strong response in my countertransference. For several years I struggled to deal with an impending sense of doom and my own disappointment about my capacity to understand her and help her move on in psychic terms. During the last years of the analysis, even though this situation did not “disappear,” it was sufficiently modified to eventually justify a termination.

Following two suicide attempts, Ms. D. started four-times-weekly analysis at the age of twenty-eight. She suffered from depression, had a tendency to stay in bed or sleep, and doubted all her choices. “I can never believe in what I am doing and I have this feeling, like a voice, that says that I am silly, that I am putting on an act, that I should be saying other things, or being somewhere else.” She presented what we could think of as a borderline personality with schizoid traits, feelings of depersonalization, phobic symptoms, and an eating disorder bordering on anorexia. She felt tortured by depressive thoughts and suicidal ideas and struggled to achieve some sense of identity. She never felt right in her own clothes and was frightened of being different. She looked at other people in the street, and the more similar she felt her clothes were to theirs, the better she felt. She felt intensely disappointed in herself and her objects and constantly debated whether to stay with her partner or leave him.

The analysis seemed like a constant struggle between her feeling that she needed help and wanting to continue and a compelling urge to leave, to disappear. For example, she decided to stop her analysis in July, before a summer holiday, but contacted me again in September saying she felt suicidal and needed to come back. She did the same with her partner, leaving him and then going back, in an agoraphobic/claustrophobic seesaw (Rey 1994). She felt that nothing was quite right for her. Sometimes she could not attend sessions because she could not find “the right clothes” to wear, or the “right shoes.” She constantly felt I was not giving her the “right” sort of help and spent long hours wondering what could “really help” her. Perhaps she should take medication? Try hypnotherapy? Go for group therapy? Look for another analyst? Move to another country? Feelings of detachment, of being “empty,” “alien,” “having a hole inside herself” coexisted with a desperation to get help, a fear of starvation (she always carried food in her bag, though she rarely ate it), and at the same time a need to reject all possible help and closeness. There was a highly idealized phantasy of self-sufficiency linked to an image of a masculine, active, and completely independent subject. To be feminine was equated with passivity and dependence and brought enormous self-hatred. At the same time, she was very passive and waited for me to provide something “special,” ending up feeling inevitably disappointed after every session.

Ms. D.’s upbringing had been difficult. The only daughter of a depressed mother and a detached father, she was born after the stillbirth of a baby boy. Her mother always expressed her longing for a boy and seemed unable to mourn his death. Ms. D.’s mother appeared fragile and reproachful and spent long hours in church praying for the dead baby’s soul. She often took her daughter to church to pray with her. It seems to me that Ms. D. learned how to fit in with her mother’s needs, as well as with her depression. She identified with her depressed mother and considered herself a disappointing child, never as good as her idealized dead brother. Ms. D. found it difficult to openly express her hostility, jealousy, and resentment toward her mother.

Sessions with Ms. D. were imbued with a feeling of mutual disappointment. She would often let me know, though not always in words, that my interpretations were wrong, inadequate, too long or too demanding, confusing or unclear. At other times, after I said something she would fall asleep or just ignore me, as if I had not spoken. Often I felt frustrated and struggled to find “the right way” to approach her. When I managed to recover some hope—perhaps after some sense of understanding or when my patient had managed to make use of what I was giving her—this was quickly knocked down. I felt this was partly due to envy but mostly to her feeling that I was still not “perfect.”

I came to understand that the experience of mutual disappointment had to do with the unconscious repetition in the transference of a relationship with an internal maternal object who was both disappointed and disappointing. But this mutual disappointment seemed a necessity for the patient, as it had a powerful binding effect, though a parasitical one, that canceled out the possibility of any movement or separation. It also locked the relationship into a painfully gratifying sadomasochistic dynamic. This enactment extended to Ms. D.’s father as well. The transference took on a more complex circular movement between disappointment, hope, and even more intense disappointment. Most of Ms. D.’s initial dreams revealed a situation that held potential hope but led usually to a sense of helplessness and isolation in which her internal objects were burglers, intruders, useless or simply absent.

Here is an example of these dreams: “I was in an old flat of mine. . . . That was the flat where I tried to kill myself. That flat was in a basement and was very dark. In the dream the flat was full of light with modern furniture. I was there with Amy [a friend], but I hated being with her. I wanted her to leave and she wouldn’t. She insisted in coming in. The flat had been intruded upon by burglars and Amy was saying something, but anything she said was stupid, was useless. I realized there were noises upstairs and I thought the burglars were still there. I tried to phone the police but I could not get through. I think I managed to get rid of Amy and went to look for a phone box.”

Several aspects of this dream touch on the subject of disappointment. Ms. D. knows she needs help. She is depressed and suicidal and is looking for a containing object/apartment that could make her feel alive, bring some light to her life, some new ideas. But this flat/body/self is intruded on and under threat from burglars. Her “friend” is both useless and stupid. Here there is an allusion to her analysis, her hopes for it, but also her view of me as somebody who will not be able to help her. There are no helpful police either. In the end she has to get rid of Amy and look for a phone booth on her own. Ms. D. is here a victim, and her objects are attacking, unavailable, or useless. Whether Amy represents me or a “useless” aspect of Ms. D. herself, the only solution is to get rid of her. But she does not give up on getting help and looks for a “phone box,” a container that can put her in touch with somebody perhaps more helpful, who can stop her from attacking (stealing) the good aspects of herself.

Her search for a phone booth made me more hopeful. I felt there was a part of her that desperately wanted to communicate her need for help. There seemed to be some belief in a good object who might want to listen to her call for protection, but as soon as I offered her help, the effort was relentlessly attacked. She regressed to a passive state that she presented in a rather masochistic and perhaps appeasing way. This seemed connected to the effect of separation, her reproaches to me for not being there when she needed me, my not being available. There was also an element of trying to make me feel guilty for not being around. It took me quite some time, however, to realize that other factors played an important part in this constellation:

Hope and hopelessness, disappointment, and helplessness, permanently shifted between us.

Three years into her analysis, Ms. D. reported a dream that showed increased insight into her participation in perpetuating our shared sense of hopelessness and disappointment. In the dream she had been hijacked by a group of people, maybe burglars or perhaps terrorists. A woman tied her hands behind her back. She looked like one of Ms. D.’s old schoolteachers. I was also there, a prisoner of the same group. My hands too were tied behind my back. In the room there were people she knew from childhood, some children and mostly women, but she could not figure out who were prisoners and who were gang members. She thought she would not be able to leave this place because we were in the middle of a desert and she couldn’t have survived on her own. There was no one around to help her. Then she saw herself no longer as a prisoner. She was now a member of the gang. She woke up feeling anxious. This dream, I think, shows Ms. D.’s complex internal object relationships as enacted in the analysis. We were locked in a room, trapped by burglars, a terrorist organization, or a gang (this bears similarities to Rosenfeld’s and Meltzer’s notion of the internal gang [Meltzer 1973; Rosenfeld 1971]). She was immobilized by a woman (her hands were tied behind her back), could not escape, or perhaps did not want to. I was there but could not help her, as I too was a prisoner of this gang, my hands similarly tied. We were, in her mind, both the same. At the end of the dream, she saw herself not as a passive victim but as part of the group that was victimizing both of us. I think this conflict brought a great deal of anxiety to her mind and woke her up.

We tried to understand the dream in the session. It seemed to me there was a healthier conflict also giving rise to this dream, and to her desire to bring it to the session: part of her wanted to escape from the internal gang that kept her tied up. There seemed also to be some kind of masochistic gratification in passively surrendering to a woman experienced as powerful. I think that in her mind both of us alternated between a passive, submissive role and a cruel, sadistic one. This situation was intensified by the “gang,” a narcissistic organization that had, in Rosenfeld’s words, the “defensive purpose to keep itself in power and so maintain the status quo” (1971, p. 174). The image of both of us surrounded by desert, with no healthy paternal object to turn to, was strikingly powerful.

She could see that the gang made her feel powerful, but that this was a defense against hopelessness and impotence. The psychic alternatives for Ms. D. were to live in an omnipotent, exciting narcissistic world (where she engaged in sadomasochistic exchanges that made her feel in control of her objects) or in a hopeless state surrounded by deserting or dead objects. Both psychic solutions, as attacks on the possibility of lively and creative interaction, were destined to make her feel disappointed and helpless, as well as making her see herself as a “disappointing” child/patient. And I would be the equally disappointing analyst, as I could help her change neither her internal world nor the outside world. We were to be forever bound by our mutual disappointment. It is notable that she felt that while I could see that her hands were tied behind her back I could not see mine. She could see my hands tied behind my back but could not see hers.

I felt the dream represented an important step in the analysis, a greater awareness of her internal world and of what she felt she was doing to herself and to me. This move, however, was marked by anxiety and possibly guilt. She seemed anxious about the state of my mind. Would I be able to free myself so that I could help her?

What were the factors that made me so disappointed in my work with Ms. D.? I think my disappointment was induced by my identification with her projected disappointing and disappointed objects. I also think my own superego must have played an important part in this process.

From Disappointment to Hope: The Role of the Superego

In 1920 Freud explored the notion of repetition compulsion in relation to the death drive, which he saw as the best example of the resistance peculiar to the unconscious (Freud 1920, 1926). In The Ego and the Id Freud (1923) continued to develop his notion of the death drive in connection to guilt and the superego. He describes how in melancholia we find an excessively strong superego that “rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the person concerned. . . . What is holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death . . .” (p. 53).

The role of the death drive is further explored in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (Freud 1937), where he considered the negative therapeutic reaction, and the phenomena of masochism and guilt, as manifestations of the death instinct.

Klein followed Freud’s dual instinct theory of the life and death drives, though for her the death drive was active from the very beginning of life. In the Kleinian model, the human psyche has two basic positions, or constellations of basic object relationships (external and internal), phantasies, anxieties, and defenses. She believed these positions persist and fluctuate throughout life. The earlier position, the “paranoid-schizoid position” (Ps), is characterized by anxieties of annihilation stemming from the death drive and by early defenses such as splitting, idealization, and projective identification. The object is experienced as a “part-object” and is split into an ideal “good” breast and a persecuting “bad” breast. Love and desire are directed to the ideal object, while the absence of satisfaction is experienced as persecution by a bad object. In favorable circumstances in the infant’s early life, good experiences predominate over bad ones. Together with the life drive, this strengthens the infant’s belief in the existence of a good object and in his own capacity to love. Introjection of the ideal object forms the root of the ego ideal aspect of the superego.

Introjection of a “bad” persecuting object forms the root of persecutory aspects of the superego. ⁴ The depressive position (D) marks the beginning of the infant’s relation to the mother as a whole object, a growing capacity for ambivalence, and recognition of absence and loss. There is greater ego integration in this position, as well as the possibility of working through the oedipus complex. The primary anxiety of the depressive position concerns the state of the good internal object. If the object is felt to be injured, the infant’s mental state is dominated by guilt and a sense of inadequacy. The infant is open to feelings of loss and mourning. The working through of this situation of mourning initiates reparative feelings and the capacity for symbolization and sublimation.

It seems to me that the capacity to bear disappointment depends in great measure on the strength and characteristics of the internalized objects that configure the superego. The harsh, ego-destructive superego of the paranoid-schizoid position punishes the individual—and his objects—with a persecuting feeling of guilt, in contrast to the superego in the depressive position, which having acquired a more protective quality is more benign and tolerant of our limitations, enabling reparation and sublimation. Given that the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions alternate throughout life, there is movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and vice versa. Bion indicated this by using the notation Ps ←→ D.

Attention to the role of projective identification in the analytic process has brought important developments in our understanding of both transference and countertransference mechanisms. ⁵ In their description of the psychoanalytic field, Baranger and Baranger (1964) proposed that the analytic situation lends itself to facilitating projective identification and that the field is constructed from and functions through projective identifications. This process in the analyst is different from that in the patient, with the analyst (ideally) being more aware of his or her reactions and normally keeping these phenomena under control so that they can be understood. There are instances, though, when the analyst is taken over by the patient’s projections and is “led” passively to enact a role the patient has unconsciously projected. This is what Grinberg (1962, 1990b) has called projective counteridentification. Among the various types of identification, it is worth remembering Racker’s notion of “complementary identifications” (1957; see also Feldman 2007), by which the patient treats the analyst as an internal (projected) object and the analyst identifies himself with this object (e.g., with a harsh maternal superego). Racker focused mainly on the analyst’s identification with archaic objects or structures in the patient. Though he did not fully investigate the patient’s role in evoking these identifications in the analyst, his work is extremely useful in helping us understand the analyst’s disappointment (Feldman 2007). We can understand differences in the quality and degree of the analyst’ s disappointment in relation to the two positions I have described. In what I call ordinary disappointment the analyst might feel guilty about failing to provide containment, understanding, and care to the patient. There might be a dip in the analyst’s self-esteem, but it is temporary and can be survived. The analyst’s capacity to think and be concerned about the patient’s welfare remains intact. There may be a feeling that the analyst was unable to understand something important, but this “flaw” is not irreversible and can be repaired.

In the case of Annie I felt very worried and guilty but still managed to function, to stay calm, and tried to understand what was going on in the session. It seemed important that I did not experience her intense wish to rid herself of her skin as an attack on me, but realized that it arose from her desperate need to rid herself of a persecuting unwanted aspect of her relationship to a maternal object. I must have identified myself with her fear of being invaded by a “diseased” skin at that point and reacted with an interpretation strongly implying that it was her skin, not mine. Though her asthma attack expressed anger and reproaches aimed at me, I was not so overtaken by guilt that I could not function as a therapist. In fact, after the asthma attack receded we were able to work together in a more thoughtful and less paranoid state.

In states of pervasive disappointment the situation is quite different. Grinberg describes how the analyst might suffer the effects of the patient’s intense projective identifications and counteridentify with them in turn. I think this dynamic often played out in the analysis of Ms. D., as it was difficult for me not to identify with the image of being a disappointing analyst. I could also easily move to seeing her as a disappointing patient. Segal (1977) emphasized that this type of countertransference reaction is often produced by patients who have themselves been heavily subjected to parental projections. In Grinberg’s view (1990a), one of the conscious or unconscious motives for patients wanting to start an analysis is a need to consolidate their sense of identity. As sometimes occurs in cases where the patient was a “replacement child,” Ms. D.’s sense of identity was in fact consolidated around her sense of being the child she should not have been, an attack on her right to be alive and to be different from her brother, on the possibility of being “herself.” I think that I was meant to feel in a similar way: that I was a flawed analyst lacking the essential capacities that would qualify me as an analyst (a capacity for introspection, a benign curiosity, a creative capacity, ethical behavior, etc.) (Grinberg 1990b).

The analyst’s capacity to identify with the patient’s projections stems from the fact that we too can be taken over by guilt and reproaches stemming from our own primitive, persecuting superegos. I think this is particularly relevant when we experience ourselves as under sustained attack. Then harsh aspects of our superego might take over and significantly diminish our capacity to think and to listen empathically to our patients. We might then find it more difficult to sustain hope and keep in touch with a more benign superego that can help us bear the patient’s attacks and continue functioning. I think this is particularly relevant when we feel that our very identity is being attacked. We no longer feel disappointed because we have not been thoughtful enough, or caring enough, or as involved as we should have been; instead the disappointment seems to originate in the feeling that we should not be doing what we are doing—basically, that we should no longer exist as analysts. This would be somehow akin to the infant’s feeling that the mother’s anger and frustration are not about her daughter or son needing to be nicer, or behave better, or even look different, but that the infant should either be somebody else or not exist at all. And the infant can feel similarly toward the mother. There are then no redeeming features that can change this picture. And still, a sadomasochistic gratification can perpetuate this type of relationship for a very long time, under the belief that if we get it right then the other will finally recognize our value and change.

In his last book, Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work, André Green (2011) writes that he wants to speak about the “real ‘disillusions’ of psychoanalytic work, that is, those that do not simply cause temporary disappointments which work out in the end”; rather, his “intention is not to divert attention from the real accomplishments that only analysis can achieve, but to ensure that we are better informed about the particular forms that analytic work can take when it gets into difficulty” (p. 96).

I think Green is addressing the need for in-depth exploration of those aspects of our work that bring “real disappointment” and so are not easy to expose and discuss. It is mainly through greater understanding of our disappointments and failures that new knowledge will evolve. According to Brenman (2006), the superego is a terrorist who engulfs and imbues the scene with moralizing practices prohibiting all pleasure, not just sexual pleasure but any pleasure whatever. He suggests that in cases where such a superego prevails, the work of the analysis must center on the task of recapturing the good object relationship, which can modify the harsh superego that suffocates development. This is certainly a difficult task, one that can be carried out only if analysts are able to survive and work through their own disappointments.