Raw Object Identification.

This paper attempts to deal with a specific kind of pathological identification-"raw object identification"-which tends to appear as concrete physiological phenomena, trying to escape meaning and integration. These somatic manifestations stem from early traumatic experiences with a meaningful object and entrap-as revealed through analysis-specific significant qualities of that object. A massive splitting ensues between body and mind, self and object, relation and identification. Certain properties of the object are then experienced as a foreign body in the subject and are defensively identified with. Thus, raw object identification is often manifested in stubborn bodily symptoms.

An Accident With the Death Drive and Its Working Through in the Analyst's Countertransference.

Working through the different faces and vicissitudes of the death drive in the countertransference, and especially through projective identification, is a very challenging process. A thorough and versatile process of containment and working through of the manifold threatening expressions and influences of the death drive is required, experienced most specifically and deeply in the arena of projective identification. This paper demonstrates how each aspect that unfolds in the analyst's countertransference sheds light on a particular layer of anxiety and internal object relations related to it. The creation of a new meaning to the differing expressions of the death drive gradually lessens the compulsion to repeat and enables a better integration between the life and death drives. This process will be illustrated by a prolonged clinical case that involved intense internal working through of the death drive in the analyst's countertransference.

Mutual Witnessing Between a Writer and Her Readers in Etty Hillesum's Diaries, 1941-1943.

Etty (Esther) Hillesum was a young Jewish Dutch woman who kept a diary throughout the entire period of the Holocaust, until she met her own death in Auschwitz. The diary, written in the hellish environment of the Nazi occupation of Holland, provides us with an opportunity to explore the transformational power manifested in the mutual witnessing that takes place between the writer and the reader. The author reviews three aspects of the writer's testimony, each one of which embodies a unique reparative function: testifying about the events, testifying as evidence, and testifying to the reader.