Hey. you never have to apologise about rambelling... you have read my posts - right? lol.

;-)

I've started reading 'the restoration of the self' which is a kind of sequal to Kohut's last book... One of the things he talks about is when an analysis is complete. I'm probably getting this wrong... Because I do find this material to be hard going... But Freud thought that the analysis basically bottoms out with acknowledgement / awareness of oedipal issues... Whereas Kohut talks about...

Fear of fragmentation. The notion that there is some state that isn't capable of being properly verbalised because it was a state that was experienced / that existed prior to us developing verbal capacities. Breaking up. Dissolution. That there was this terror and fear around this experience. That people sometimes put that same terror onto objects (in the case of phobias, for example) but that basically it was a terror of loss of self or annihilation of self or the breaking up of self.

He thought that couldn't be analysed... And that the analysis could be finished satisfactorily even though people might not understand that this was the origin of their fears and that this was what their fears were really all about.

One theory anyway. But what you said struck me... And it reminded me of that.

Just my random rambellings ;-)