« The interpretation can be given to a global person when the material to be interpreted came only from a part of the overall person. As a global person, the patient would not have been able to give the material to be interpreted. »

« With this particular patient, it was vitally important for me to recognize that at the centre there was nothing. Not only did he not believe that there was something there that could be called "him", but in fact he knew that in the centre there was nothing, which was for him the only bearable thing. If I began to give him any hope that there was something in the center, he had to destroy me. »

« Concern . . . describes the relationship between the destructive elements in impulse relationships with objects and other positive aspects of establishing a relationship. It is presumed to belong to a period preceding the classic Oedipus complex, a relationship between three total people. The capacity for care belongs to the dueshey relationship between the infant and the mother or the maternal surrogate. If all goes well, the mother, by continuing to exist and be available, is both the mother who receives all the instinctive impulses of the little child, and also the mother whom one can love as a person and to whom one can make reparation. In this way, the anguish relating to the instinctive impulses and fantasies of these impulses, become bearable for the small child who can then live the guilt or who can keep it in suspense while waiting for an opportunity for reparation. To this guilt, which is thus contained, but not felt as such, we give the name of "solicitude". In the early stages of development, if there is not a safe maternal figure to receive the gesture of reparation, guilt becomes unbearable and carelessness cannot be tested. The lack of reparation leads to a loss of the capacity for care: it is replaced by primitive forms of guilt and anguish. »