FINDING THE POSSIBLE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE CLINICAL AND THEORETICAL WORK OF NINA FARHI

FINDING THE POSSIBLE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE CLINICALAND THEORETICAL WORK OF NINA FARHI

Jean White

abstract In a psychoanalytic career spanning three decades, Nina Farhi (1943–2009)worked primarily with people who had survived near impossible emotional and psycho-logical circumstances. In a series of clinical papers, she theorized the ways in which herpatients had managed to preserve embryonic self-states against all odds and the arduous,imaginative and resourceful psychoanalytic work required to transform these vestiges ofsurvival into creative living. This paper traces the evolution of Farhi’s clinical thought,from her surprising and fresh uses of particular concepts of Winnicott’s to her originalre-working of some of Marion Milner’s foundational insights.It explores the ways in whichFarhi’s clinical practice was original and the clinical and theoretical legacy she leaves.

Key words: psychoanalytic endurance, philosophical romanticism, Winnicott, Milner,unconscious resourcefulness in the service of psychic survival, annealing identification

This paper is intended as an introduction to the work of one of the most unusualpsychoanalytic psychotherapists to have practised in London. Nina Farhi was amember of the Guild of Psychotherapists and taught on its training committee(1989–1999) and also Director of the Squiggle Foundation (1989–1996).Although she had suffered from systemic lupus erythematosus for many years,her advanced cancer was not diagnosed until a month before she died and soher death in March 2009 was tragically sudden.

This paper recounts and explores Farhi’s insights and vision, and looks at hercontribution to the ways in which we think about psychoanalytic work. Thepaper is not intended as an in-depth discussion of the work of Winnicott orMilner, as excellent expositions of their work can be found elsewhere (forWinnicott, see, for example, Caldwell & Joyce, 2011; Davis & Wallbridge, 1981;Phillips, 1988; White, 2006; and, for Milner, see the excellent new introductionsby Adam Phillips (2010), Janet Sayers (2010), Rachel Bowlby (2011), MaudEllman (2011) and Hugh Haughton (2011) to the re- publication of her booksunder the general editorship of Emma Letley and see also White (2006).

Throughout her long career Farhi worked primarily, but not exclusively, withvery damaged and disturbed people in intensive high-frequency psychoanalyticwork, often at a very low fee. She was never known to have turned a patientaway because they could not afford to pay nor, to my knowledge, did she everrefuse to take on a patient because of their level of disturbance.To the contrary,the more daunting the challenge, the greater the relish with which she rose to it.She viewed herself, as Masud Khan described Marion Milner, as ‘the servant ofan [analytic] process’ – with the utmost certainty and a singular pride (Milner,

JEAN WHITE is a pluralist psychoanalytic psychotherapist, supervisor and lecturer, whohas practised in London for over 30 years.She is the author of Generation:Preoccupationsand Conflicts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge,2006) and also of many paperspublished in journals and edited collections. She lectures and supervises internationally.An earlier version of this paper was given as the Guild of Psychotherapists Annual PublicLecture in London in November 2010.Address for correspondence: Flat 5, 77 SunnysideRoad, London N19 3SL. [[email protected]]

172

© The authorBritish Journal of Psychotherapy © 2012 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600

Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0118.2012.01275.x

1969, p. xxxi). She was a good example of the quality she deemed most essentialto psychoanalysis, that of endurance.

Many trainee and experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapists found her tobe an exceptional supervisor, both in her challenging insights and in her deter-mination to get to the root of a patient’s vestiges of a sense of self or theirdefences against the lack of them. Almost to the end of her life, she ran anunusual form of supervision group, which she called firstly ‘Clinical Issues:Conversations in the Inter-Subjective Field’ and latterly ‘Psychoanalytic Dia-logues’. In these groups Farhi aimed to enable the participants to generate theirown conceptualizations of their clinical work (Birgitta Johansson, personalcommunication). Many of her supervisees describe her as extremely supportive,as Farhi was able to see the potential in many fledgling psychotherapists’ workand often believed these embryonic talents could be developed to an excep-tional degree. She was not overly given to false modesty but her singular pridedid not extend to herself alone: she gave to patients, supervisees, colleagues andfriends with unstinting generosity.

Nina Farhi held a passionate belief in Winnicott’s tenet that psychoanalytictheory needs to be created anew – with originality and with pleasure (Farhi,1996b, p. 404). She shared that belief in her unusual supervision groups and alsoin her work as both a founder member of the Squiggle Foundation and itsDirector. She ran Saturday morning seminars in her home on ‘Original Themesin the Work of D.W. Winnicott’ with child care professionals, music, art anddrama therapists, teachers, GPs, architects, writers, academics and artists as wellas psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. These seminarsattracted an increasingly large and varied membership. Farhi extended thiswork in giving lectures, supervision and workshops throughout Britain andinternationally (in Israel, in particular), both on behalf of the Squiggle Foun-dation and then, later in her career, in her own right.

Winnicott’s work became Farhi’s lifelong inspiration and primary resourcebut she loved Marion Milner with a passion, both as her great friend, hercolleague (Milner was a devotee of the Saturday morning seminars until verylate in her long life) and as a theorist, an under-appreciated visionary as Farhisaw it. Farhi eventually came to see Milner’s ‘visceral intelligence’, as shedescribed it, her radical approach to clinical work with people whose level ofdisturbance could not be treated or theorized within the psychoanalytic ortho-doxy of her time and her insistence on the non-separability of body/mindexperience as the prefigurative forms of all psychoanalytic work. Milner andFarhi shared a clarity and a palpable freshness of vision, a capacity to see realityheightened and intensified not just through a deeply empathic sensitivity butalso through imaginative perception. Neither let their intuition be clouded bypreconceptions. They could both see layers of truth and meaning in disturbedand disturbing communications of many variants. They could both venture intothe ‘beyond’, that most beloved word of Lacan (White, 2006), and stay with whatthey found there.

Winnicott, Milner and arguably Farhi perpetuated and reinvented a pecu-liarly English psychoanalytic tradition, combining philosophical romanticism

JEAN WHITE 173

with both idealism and pragmatism. All three prioritized the quality of subjec-tivity (in whatever form it might take), intuition, passion, and cultural andaesthetic experience (Rayner, 1990; White, 2006).

Despite Farhi’s prodigious work ethic and output, researching the material Ineeded for this paper was neither straightforward nor easy. Farhi publishedrelatively little – her three major clinical papers in English in the North Ameri-can international journals Contemporary Psychoanalysis and PsychoanalyticDialogues constitute the summation of her life’s work (Farhi, 2003a, 2008a,2010). She also wrote pieces such as an appreciation of Marion Milner writtenfor the British Journal of Psychotherapy (Farhi, 1998c), an extensive introduc-tion to the Gaddini–Winnicott correspondence (Farhi, 2003b), book reviewsand the like. But thanks to the generous assistance of the Squiggle Foundationand Moris Farhi, Nina’s husband, I managed to track down a large number ofunpublished papers as well as two translated into French (Farhi, 1996a, 2000),two into Greek (Farhi, 1998a, 2004) and a paper in the Irish Journal of Child andAdolescent Psychotherapy on the implications of Winnicott’s Squiggle game forher work with an adult patient (Farhi, 1998b). I also listened to 24 hours of tapedpresentations and lectures Farhi gave for the Squiggle Foundation.

In these lectures and workshops for Squiggle, Farhi explored Winnicott’swork in exhaustive, thoroughgoing detail, frequently drawing from lesserknown works such as Home is Where We Start From (Winnicott, 1986) andPsychoanalytic Explorations (Winnicott, 1989). Her meticulous analysis of themeaning and intricacies of each of Winnicott’s major concepts, including thetransitional or third area in infant development and cultural life, the uses ofbenign aggression and object usage as contrasted with relating through identi-fication, was neither controversial nor very different from other interpretationsof Winnicott’s work (see, for example, Caldwell & Joyce 2011; Phillips, 1988;White, 2006). However, Farhi introduced her own personal constructions of theimplications of Winnicott’s work in her focus on the forms of emotional envir-onmental provision necessary for regression to dependence and her emphasison Winnicott’s use of humour, paradox and ellipse.

Her lectures were frequently very funny. For example, she quoted fromWinnicott’s letter to Hanna Segal on the subject of the latter’s ‘cocksureness’.Winnicott wrote:

With the very greatest pleasure I have watched you develop in analysis and I knowof no analysis which has been more successful . . . With all this in mind naturally Iam concerned that you shall not spoil it all by getting into some sort of ugly statein which you are sitting perched up on top of a Mount Everest of an internalizedgood breast. (Winnicott, 1987, p. 26)

Farhi did not only select these quotations from Winnicott to entertain heraudience. Throughout her lectures, one of her primary concerns was to suggestthe paradoxical and fluid nature of Winnicott’s thought, as it is within thisapparent elusiveness that the surprise and aliveness of Winnicott’s way ofworking is to be discovered. She therefore emphasized apparent paradoxes suchas ‘. . . it is joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found’ (Winnicott, 1963,

174 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2012) 28(2)

p. 186), how to be isolated without being insulated (ibid.), and surprise as theforerunner of personal discovery and creativity (passim). And, in the example Iquoted, the warning about the exaltation of the good breast stands in nicecontradiction with Farhi’s own constant emphasis on the importance of asecurely internalized good object.

Above all, in these lectures, Farhi returned repeatedly to Winnicott’s idea thatsome patients need to regress to the ‘. . . first state before aliveness, wherealoneness is a fact and long before dependence is encountered’ (Winnicott,1988, p. 132, author’s emphasis). As we shall see, this startling assertion,coloured by Farhi’s unique interpretation of these very primitive states of being,infused almost all her subsequent work.

Most of Farhi’s earlier papers described the way she was creating her distinc-tive approach to clinical work from her elaboration of Winnicott’s view thatdisturbance is always related to health as the freezing of an environmentalfailure. She constantly stressed Winnicott’s emphasis on emotional environmen-tal provision and his deceptively minimalist approach, and frequently quotedsuch apparently quixotic lines as ‘I aim at being myself and behaving myself.Having begun an analysis I expect to continue with it, to survive it and to end it’and ‘In analysis one asks: how much can one be allowed to do? And by contrast,in my clinic the motto is: how little need be done?’ (Winnicott, 1962, p. 166,author’s emphasis).

In one of Farhi’s representative early papers, entitled ‘Winnicott and theconcept of a healthy individual’ (date unknown), she began with Winnicott’sfundamental belief in the capacity of individuals to ‘hitch on’ to health, stressingin her own words that there is an inherited potential for health that is present inall of us throughout life and that this potential may ‘. . . remain hidden in thedeepest core of the psyche, existing in a kind of self-communing in earliestinfancy which, from the outside, might very well resemble madness’ (Farhi, dateunknown, p. 1). Those of you already familiar with Farhi’s work will recognizethis characteristic emphasis on finding an innate struggle towards health in eventhe most apparently bizarre and disturbed and disturbing behaviours and com-munications. Farhi continued her paper with an account of the treatment of a 68year-old woman locked in self-communing of an academic variety to the pointthat she had never experienced any form of human relationship.After a difficultbirth and very disturbed parenting, this woman had formed (in Farhi’s words)‘effective, hard, autistic-like defences against further intrusion . . . her brilliantintellectuality forming the positive pole against the possibility of mental col-lapse’ (ibid., p. 11). This emphasis on the primitive, early exigencies that enablepsychic survival when maternal provision is disturbed was to become a recur-rent theme and preoccupation of Farhi’s and led her to prioritize working withpatients who were seemingly impossible to relate to and whose rigid hardeneddefences made for extreme duress in treatment.

Expounding on the extreme difficulty in working with such patients, Farhiquoted Winnicott: ‘Trauma means the breaking of the continuity of the line ofthe individual’s existence’ (Winnicott, 1967, p. 22), explaining that the rigiddefences must be clung to against the terror of re-experiencing trauma and

JEAN WHITE 175

disintegration. But, she argued, even though the work carries high risk for thepatient and a heavy burden of work for the therapist: ‘. . . what we and they havein common is what Winnicott refers to as the obdurate potential for a life ofmeaning that remains in the human organism as an inherent, predisposedpossibility given a good-enough environment. And given sufficient time’ (ibid.,pp. 17–18, my emphasis).

In another early paper, ‘In fear of his life: Fate, destiny and the struggle forsurvival’, translated into French as ‘Survivre à son destin’, Farhi (2000) recountedthe story of a man who had been tuberculous and literally trussed in a frame forsix years in childhood. Before Streptomycin was discovered, the treatment of TBinvolved total bed rest and, as it was impossible for children to remain immobile,they were sometimes bound. Farhi’s patient survived by such ingenious means astightening a strap on his frame to feel pain, licking metal for its different taste andwatching a wax crayon melt on a radiator, in order that he could feel somethingof himself and gain a sense of time passing. Such extreme devices were necessaryin the service of psychic survival. Farhi quoted Primo Levi on:‘. . . man’s capacityto dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier ofdefences, even in apparently desperate circumstances’ (Levi, 1979, p. 62). Coun-tertransferentially, she doubted for her own survival in the face of her patient’smalice, bullying and brutalizing contempt. Eventually some breakthroughmoments came when her patient, ‘John’, was occasionally able to experiencesimple enjoyment in everyday pleasures, which Winnicott and Farhi deemed tobe the initial glimpses of the possibility of true self engagement. Sadly, theoutcome for this patient was still uncertain at the end of the paper.

Farhi’s emphasis on time, endurance and staying with the patient in intersub-jective communication of whatever forms, whether it be silent, whether it bebizarre and especially whether it be arduous and taxing, informed her threemajor papers for the North American journals, Contemporary Psychoanalysisand Psychoanalytic Dialogues. However, before I discuss those papers, it isnecessary to understand something of the inspiration Farhi gleaned fromMarion Milner.

As Dodi Goldman (2010a) says, three traditions simultaneously infused Mil-ner’s writing: existential self-exploration, mystical encounters and psychoana-lytic theorizing, thereby creating a unique voice, which remains distinctive tothis day. Milner created Winnicott anew, using her own experiments with statesof altered perception and consciousness (Milner, 1977). She was primarily con-cerned with ‘. . . the problem of psychic creativity’ whatever the level of distur-bance of her patient (Milner, 1956, p. 169). For Milner, the ‘integrative force’ ofvisceral perception, indissoluble from bodily experience, and ‘the inherentrhythmic capacity of the psycho-physical organism can become a source oforder that is more stable than reliance on an order imposed either from theoutside, or by the conscious planning mind’ (Milner, 1957, pp. 216, 224; White,2006). As such, she challenged the prevailing psychoanalytic view on symbolformation (Goldman, 2010a).

As a result of Milner’s explorations into her own psyche (Milner as JoannaField, 1934, 1937), she laid the theoretical foundations for what today might be


thought of as alterations in self-states (Goldman, 2010a), which were to becomeFarhi’s major preoccupations. Milner believed in the possibility of forms ofconsciousness that permit incorporation of apparently incompatible extremes(White, 2006). Or, as Farhi herself put it:

Here was a visionary whose lambent prose and visceral imagination distilled allthat was dense, diffuse and seemingly beyond representation into a form that couldbe embraced with wonder, fear and deep excitement. (Farhi, 1998c, p. 249)

Milner understood the formative value of idealization and so too did Farhi,believing fervently in the importance of intense cathexis of all forms, whethercultural, interpersonal or of the natural world, and the near-miraculous natureof our work with some patients. Milner placed a high value on ecstatic experi-ence, drawing from Winnicott’s concept of ‘ego orgasm’ as a climax of idimpulse in satisfactory play for children (Winnicott, 1958; White, 2006). Milnerconsidered ecstatic experience in adults to constitute formative, crystallizing,epiphanic moments in which a loss of boundaries between self and other,between internal and external reality, could be transiently glimpsed. For Milner,such epiphanic moments incorporated perception, active imagination andextremes of experience reduced and constricted in ratiocinative endeavour,even, as she said to Eric Rayner (1990), when they took the form of an ecstasyof hate – a state of mind you will recognize in one of Farhi’s later papers (Farhi,2008a).

I shall now explore each of Farhi’s three major papers in depth, as it is in thesethat we find her thought in its most evolved and sophisticated form (Farhi,2003a, 2008a, 2010). In each of these papers, we might want to note that theclinical presentation is extreme, psychic processes are sometimes equated withprimitive biological forms of evolution, and there is a continual emphasis onunconscious resourcefulness in the service of psychic survival in near-impossible circumstances. Each of these three papers also outlines the move-ment from fatedness to destiny described by Christopher Bollas (1989) inForces of Destiny. Bollas states:

I believe we can use the idea of fate to describe the sense a person may have,determined by a life history, that his true self has not been met and facilitated intolived experience. A person who feels fated is already someone who has not experi-enced reality as conducive to the fulfilment of his inner idiom. Thus I can link thesense of fate to the concept of the false self and to Winnicott’s idea of reactiveliving . . . We can use the concept of destiny to address the evolution of the trueself, to ask for any individual whether he is fulfilling his destiny. (Bollas, 1989, p. 33)

The journals Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Dialoguespublish two or three critical commentaries from other psychoanalysts on eachof their clinical papers.Therefore, as part of my discussion of Farhi’s later work,I shall refer to some of these commentaries, as it seems to me that in order tocomprehend the nature of Farhi’s achievement, it needs to be set within acritical context.

The first North American paper, ‘In her mother’s name: Imitation, apre-identificatory mechanism of defence’, was published in Contemporary

JEAN WHITE 177

Psychoanalysis in 2003, and had been previously published in French as ‘Laduplication autoplastique élargie’ (Farhi, 1996a). Here Farhi recounted theanalysis of a patient she called ‘Anne’, whose physical presence was shockinglydissonant. Anne had been a drug addict for many years and had ‘no psychicplace at all in which to have experiences’ nor indeed any capacity to relate toothers (Farhi, 2003a, p. 76). Farhi felt that her presence (as that was all it was forthe first seven years of four-times weekly analysis) was non-negotiable andcomforted herself with Winnicott’s words to Masud Khan: ‘If [the patient]sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you canhelp him alright’ (Winnicott, 1972, p. 1, quoted in Farhi, 2003a, p. 76).

It took years for the psychoanalytic couple to establish Anne’s history. Hermother had undergone a hysterectomy immediately after Anne’s birth and thenhad a psychotic breakdown. Anne was looked after by a series of nannies. Hermother remained disturbed and had repeated ECT treatments and medicationthroughout Anne’s childhood but became able to tolerate brief snatches ofAnne’s presence only. Anne never ate with her parents. From about age 14, shebegan to help herself to her mother’s medication and thereafter to any drugsshe could get hold of until she began treatment with Farhi at age 29. Anne hadalso been subjected to facial and bodily surgery at her mother’s insistence.

When her parents divorced, Anne changed her name to her mother’s maidenname, the name she came to Farhi with. She partook in violent, dangeroussexual activity and was ritually bulimic. Farhi concluded that Anne’s early lifeconstituted a psychic near-death and that her survival mechanism was a spuri-ous imitation, firstly of her mother, most comically in her dissonant class snob-bery from the 1950s, and later of Farhi. For the first seven years of her analysis,Anne was an apparently, if incongruously, model patient, observing Farhi’spractice, apparently digesting and making use of her interpretations and theo-retical premises. She aimed to train as a psychotherapist herself. She becamedrug-free, the bulimia stopped and she bought a small flat, made a few friendsand was offered a university teaching post with research funds.

Then, as often in Farhi’s cases, something simply happened. Anne walked outof her master’s exams, became homeless and announced that she was leavingEngland the next week. When challenged by Farhi, she became silent andemitted a high-pitched humming.Thereafter she sat up and remained mute withrapid eye-blinking for six weeks. Farhi’s feelings ranged ‘. . . from incomprehen-sion to murderous rage, to absolute deadness and apathy’ (Farhi, 2003a, p. 79).She eventually came to the conclusion that she was experiencing ‘. . . the fullforce of Anne’s mother’s early psychic denial of her daughter’s birth’ (ibid.,p. 80). Crucially, Farhi stopped trying to force her view of what was going on intoAnne and this became Anne’s point of departure for a life in her own right andin her own name. Farhi came to view those silent six weeks as a state of isolation,Winnicott’s ‘sanctified inner core’, into which the nascent self withdraws inorder to suffer no further damage (ibid., p. 81).

Farhi theorized Anne’s seven years of imitation using Ferenczi’s concept of‘autoplastic duplication’, a process that enables organisms to acquire or modifytheir shape and functional parts in the interests of survival and evolution


(Ferenczi, 1919, p. 97).This ‘imitation in order to become’ (Gaddini, 1992, p. 125)was likened to Tustin’s description of the way that autistic children imitate: asthey have no internal space, they cannot yet identify or project or introject.Thisconstitutes an ‘adhesive equation’ or ‘adhesive identicality’ (Tustin, 1990, p. 67).Farhi likened Anne’s humming and blinking to echopraxia and echolaliain autism, which are both techniques for shutting the world out. After thiscritical episode in Anne’s analysis, which Farhi viewed as a psychic birth, Annebecame able to be herself and to take up her destiny as inscribed in her geneticendowment.

James Grotstein (2003) and Anthony Bass (2003) both published commen-taries on ‘In her mother’s name’. In Grotstein’s opinion,Anne’s apparent imita-tion of Farhi was – due to lack of internal space and subjectivity – an evenmore primitive process. He thinks sensory impressions were taken to be theobject, which was internally dismantled ‘. . . in an attempt to develop a scaf-folding or infrastructure to support her abjectly undeveloped self’ (Grotstein,2003, p. 103). He likens Anne’s loss of her mother at birth to his concept of‘orphans of the Real’ (Grotstein, 1995a, 1995b), where ‘[I]f the infant is notmade to feel safe, protected, and blessed’, primal repression is faulty, creating‘black holes’ in psychic space (Grotstein, 2003, p. 104). Bass, on the otherhand, focuses on the fact that Farhi was a newly qualified psychotherapistwhen Anne entered her practice, and so Anne enabled her to become a moremature practitioner, with less need to interpret and more capacity to bearnear-intolerable states of mind.

Farhi’s next major clinical paper, entitled ‘In the beginning was darkness:Images across the void’, is widely known and was published in ContemporaryPsychoanalysis (Farhi, 2008a). A surprisingly short paper, ‘Images’ containsrelatively little clinical material from her patient, ‘Sarah’, but what Farhi did sayis packed with meaning, in particular the way in which her dread of her patientcontained the seeds of their mutual transformation. It is also in this paper thatFarhi’s highlighting of the twin poles of the aesthetic and the moral as theorganizing principles of human development begin to emerge together with thefirst inklings of the unconscious bonding Farhi described as ‘annealed identifica-tion’, which, as we shall see, is developed much further in her next and lastpaper, ‘The hands of the living god’ (Farhi, 2010).

Farhi’s introduction to ‘Images across the void’ describes the ways in which,having ceased to lecture on Winnicott, she discovered her own creativefreedom. She believed this to be compounded by her intellectual isolation asher illness worsened. She said she had found a new source of inspiration in theNorth American journals, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and PsychoanalyticDialogues, with their emphasis on intersubjectivity and self-states. I shall quotea paragraph from this paper in full as I believe this statement to be the mostconcise summary of the way Farhi worked. She wrote:

In clinical work, particularly with deeply disturbed patients, I sought to listen totheir often idiosyncratic vocalizations as creative fragments from the core of theirdisordered selves. I found myself harvesting their images, self-presentations, enact-ments, and sometimes re-enactments, as tentative movements towards me. If I

JEAN WHITE 179

could be still enough to register and store them, I could allow them to interpen-etrate my own internal world. Thus, an enlarged arena presented itself to me.(Farhi, 2008a, p. 3)

In ‘Images’, Farhi’s patient Sarah’s mother, a manic-depressive, had expelledSarah’s older sister from the house. Sarah, aged 4, smuggled food out to her. Infour-times weekly analysis, Sarah made no eye contact but enacted what Farhidescribed as ‘a performance art of malignant vitality’ (ibid., p. 4). Farhi experi-enced dismay at Sarah’s delusional self-states: ‘She was a vampire who lived offbabies she passed in the street. She intended to marry her sister.They inhabited“a shared genius . . . a form of fission” ’ (ibid., p. 6). Sarah wrote of their ‘mostsophisticated wickedness . . . We will be punished apocalyptically . . . It issatanic iniquity’ (ibid., p. 6). Farhi came to understand these apparently malignself-states as the chaos and dread experienced in earliest infancy if the baby isnot contained by ‘maternal reverie’ (Bion, 1967, p. 116). She thought she ‘. . . wasbeing bombarded by the precipitates of Sarah’s infinitely fragile self, which wereboth unassimilated and introjectively infused with her mother’s psychosis’(Farhi, 2008a, p. 7).

Sarah was preoccupied with the Kabbalah and so too became Farhi. TheZohar, the classic text of Jewish mysticism, speaks of a spark of holiness in thedomain of evil as the world unfolds from nothingness. Every change of formenables a fleeting mystical moment to become visible (Scholem, 1955, p. 117).An interpenetration of forces must therefore be set in motion. In the ‘break-ing of vessels’, or the dispersal of Divine Light at the beginning of creation,‘. . . sparks of holiness are bound in fetters of steel in the depths of theirshells, and yearningly aspire to rise to their source but cannot avail to do sountil they have support’ (ibid., p. 45, my emphasis). Farhi interpreted this asthe way that an uncontained infant will latch onto anything, ‘correspondences,clang similarities, similarities and analogies’, to aspire to a rhythm of safetyand mutuality (Tustin, 1986, p. 273). Farhi therefore felt she needed to enterthe gross arrhythmia of Sarah’s world in order for the material for aestheticand moral sensibility and ontological dynamism to be gathered. Through thisprocess, Farhi discovered ‘the filaments of evil’ within herself (Farhi, 2008a,p. 13).

At the end of this powerful paper, Farhi reflected on how the insights she hadgained in her work with Sarah could be applied to ‘. . . the inter- and intrapsy-chic relationships of collectivities of individuals in all societies at any particularperiod of history’ (ibid., p. 15). She concluded that: ‘. . . [T]he eruption of suchcatastrophes as the Shoah, the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian apotheosisunder Pol Pot’ are constellated through a collective disowning of the potentialfor evil within the group (ibid., pp. 15–16).

This paper provoked a very critical discussion, longer than the paper itself,from Richard Chevetz (2008), which Farhi acknowledged made her angry in herpublished response (Farhi, 2008b). Chevetz argues that there was not enoughflesh on Farhi’s clinical descriptions to be able to see what actually happened inSarah’s analysis but that from what was revealed, there seemed to be a series of


dissociated self-states for which the clinical task would be to link them up withthe patient’s feelings in the here and now. He thinks Sarah’s mind was frozen ina pre-borderline disorganized/disorientated pattern for affect regulation andthat the apparently satanic, evil and demonic are metaphorical, not actuallypsychotic. His final criticism is that Farhi never took up the anger and rage in thetransference (Chevetz, 2008).

A far kinder clinical commentary came from Joyce Slochower (2008), whostresses the difficulty inherent in Farhi’s containment of her overwhelmingpatient. Slochower links Farhi’s discussion with Grotstein (1990a, 1990b) andGrand’s (2000) work on evil and trauma. Grotstein, following Bion, links thedynamic of evil with core feelings of hate, envy and greed, which strip awaymeaning through attacks on linking, resulting in ‘nothingness’. Only in thepresence of a powerful containing function can meaning begin to arise indialectical tension with nothingness (Slochower, 2008, p. 44). Grand discussesevil in a relational context, in which nothingness and ‘catastrophic loneliness’make their way into an intersubjective field, resulting in a profound malignantdissociative contagion. She suggests that: ‘. . . Telling about trauma permits theconstruction of truth and the gradual partial establishment of historicity andsubjectivity’ (ibid., p. 45, her emphasis).

Slochower concludes that Farhi’s containment of Sarah enabled her todeepen her access to her own emotional states, thereby creating an arena ofinterpenetrating subjectivity that enabled Sarah to develop a sense of interior-ity and eventually to become able to ‘mentalize’ (Fonagy & Target, 1998;Slochower, 1999, 2004). Slochower is uncertain, though, how the process ofseparation took place and speculates on the role of Farhi’s illness within this.

Undeterred by Chevetz’s unusually trenchant critique, Farhi went on to writea third paper, ‘The hands of the living god’, which was published posthumouslyin Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2010. A much earlier version of this paper hadbeen translated into Greek (Farhi, 2004). Essentially, this paper constitutes are-working of Milner’s (1969) book of the same title to incorporate Farhi’sconcept of annealing identification and, controversially, to speculate on thelasting impact of Milner’s patient, Susan’s, experiences in the womb, whichMilner herself had tactically referred to as a fantasy. Farhi began by discussingthe ways in which pregnancy is fraught with biological conflict between motherand foetus: they compete for nutrients, blood supply and control of hormonelevels (Haig, 1993). She claimed that pregnancies survive through the process ofan annealed identification: mother and infant anneal themselves together toensure the survival of both. This psycho-physical bond gives rise to ‘a commonsea of experience where the ordinary boundaries between one person’s privateexperience and another’s do not function’ (Milner, 1969, p. 324, quoted in Farhi,2010, p. 484). Farhi suggested that Susan’s mother’s hostile intent (and a putativeattempted abortion) became traumatic to Susan and that this trauma disruptedthe establishment of an annealed identification. When Susan came to Milner,she was unable to relate to her as a separate person and had no sense of internalspace. Milner quickly discovered that an interpretive approach was ineffectualin working with Susan.

JEAN WHITE 181

Then Susan began to draw what became a series of hundreds of astonishingimages, a number of which were reproduced in Farhi’s paper (Farhi, 2010). Farhibelieved that Susan’s drawings were the medium to establishing an annealingidentification in the transference with Milner. Susan ‘adhered’ to her analyst(who, of course, also had a great interest in drawing) by establishing a symbolicplacental link through which emotional nourishment became possible. ForFarhi, Milner’s ability to tolerate and work with this annealed state was crucial.Annealment needed to be established before separation could become possible.

Nina Farhi’s concept of annealed or annealing identification refers to (in herown words) ‘. . . an attempt to create a configuration where a quite particularand literal attachment is formed when survival itself inheres at the level of themother–infant/analyst–infant struggle for psycho-physiological survival’ (Farhi,2010, p. 484). Farhi played on the historical meanings of the term, ‘annealing’,used to connote both softening and hardening processes in the production ofmetals, which she claimed allows for an enduring conjunction. Farhi alsoreferred to the modern usage of annealing in relation to DNA. Here, in Farhi’swords: ‘. . . annealing refers to the process of heating and then cooling of thenucleic acid in order to separate strands and induce combinations at lowertemperatures with complementary strands of different molecular entities withinthe helix in intra-uterine genetic evolution’ (ibid., p. 485). Farhi saw this as thetemplate of (in her own words) ‘. . . what we would today recognize as getting atthe fundamental nature of inter-subjectivity in all relationships’, and of coursespecifically in the analyst–patient dyad (ibid., p. 487). Using a large number ofSusan’s drawings as illustrations, she then went on to explore how she saw thisprocess operate in Susan’s long analysis with Milner.

Farhi used the term ‘intersubjectivity’ in a very particular sense and in thispaper as the correlative of an annealing bond which can be analytically trans-formed from a malignant annealing rigidity to a generative level of fusionnecessary to growth. Farhi’s original concept of ‘annealed identification’ intro-duces an illuminating dimension into psychoanalytic work with deeply dis-turbed people. It is an innovative and very serviceable way to think about thepsychic interpenetration between patient and analyst for patients with veryearly damage and for analysts with the level of clinical endurance needed to putit into practice. It both complements and supplements Thomas Ogden’s conceptof the ‘intersubjective analytic third’ (Ogden, 1994, 1997).

Farhi’s last paper was commented on by Avgi Saketopoulou, Dodi Goldmanand Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, and then they each wrote very moving and appre-ciative discussions of each others’ commentaries (Saketopoulou, 2010a, 2010b;Goldman, 2010a, 2010b; Wolff Bernstein, 2010a, 2010b). I also wrote a shortintroduction to Farhi’s professional life and work and provided a critical dis-cussion of Milner’s book, Farhi’s paper and the first round of the other threecommentaries (White, 2010). Saketopoulou (2010a) demonstrates how usefulthe concept of an ‘annealed identification’ was to her in her work with a patientwhose biological mother had attempted to abort him. Goldman (2010a) writesa beautiful disquisition on Milner’s revolutionary vision of analytic work butquestions the implied intentionality of the struggle for survival in the womb as


Farhi described it. Wolff Bernstein (2010a) highlights Susan’s lack of a paternalthird and the dangers of maternal jouissance and amplifies this through theLacanian perspective on Freud’s concept of primal repression, in whichthe capacity for symbolization goes awry when no absence or movement ispermitted in the early maternal relationship (Lacan, 1959–60).

I wrote an appreciative yet critical discussion of Farhi’s paper and I willbriefly mention some of the main features of my commentary here, as it seemsto me that in order to understand the great and radical aspects of the visionNina Farhi bequeathed to us, they must be problematized within the complexnature of the analytic endeavour and other developments in psychoanalytictheory and insight.The way Farhi used the term, ‘intersubjectivity’, refers to oneaspect only of its many possible interpersonal and psychoanalytic forms. Itcould be dangerous to use this term as if it were solely synonymous with amerging or fusional level of psychic interpenetration as this exclusive applica-tion of the term could pre-empt the negotiation of the many levels and stages ofpsychic separation and triangulation necessary to the later phases of analysisand psychic growth, even at a psychotic level of disturbance (White, 2006). Atworst, the use of the term ‘intersubjectivity’ as if it only connotes psychologicalfusion could condone a dyadic bond that need never be analytically challenged.The role of aggression, deemed so central to the recognition of alterity byWinnicott and Benjamin, can be ignored only at great cost to our patients’ drivetowards separation (Benjamin, 1995; Winnicott, 1969). Aggression in the formof primitive ruthlessness was unmistakeably present in both Milner’s and manyof Farhi’s own cases and not taken up in the service of their patients need tobegin the process of separation in the later phases of analysis.

Many analysts from both the post-Kleinian and Independent groups, includ-ing most notably Bion (1967) and Searles (1965), have shown how psychoticpatients can move beyond singular perspectives in the later phases of theiranalyses. Paternal function and a third position therefore eventually need tobe found in the mind of the analyst as well as the mother. In Milner’s (1969)book, The Hands of the Living God, the first elements of an extremelygradual emergence of a third position in Susan’s mind can be tracked throughher drawings, the decrease in her frequency of analytic attendance, and even-tually through her marriage. These elements could, of course, initially only betentatively observed in analysis: a premature interpretation of self/object dif-ferentiation or the lack of it, before the patient is psychologically ready, canbe ‘suicidal-despair-engendering’, as Searles so eloquently puts it (Searles,1986, p. 19). This observation in itself, however, could constitute the begin-nings of a vitally important third position or paternal function in the analyst’smind.

I supported Farhi’s hypothetical discussion of the nature of intra-uterine lifeand the ways in which this might have been recapitulated in the intersubjectivetransference/countertransference relationship between Milner and her patient,using the Lacanian concept of the ‘Real’ and Alessandra Piontelli’s remarkable,groundbreaking evidence of the way small children replicate their patterns ofbehaviour within the womb (observed through ultrasound scans) and act out

JEAN WHITE 183

conflicts from intra-uterine (non)experience in their analyses with her (Lacan,1953–54; Piontelli, 1992).

Lacan’s later (post-1964) theory of the partial drives, including his addition ofscopic and invocatory drives with their concomitant partial objects of the gazeand the voice, introduced an aesthetic dimension to human evolution and aretherefore relevant to Farhi’s conception of the purpose of her life’s work andultimately to her sense of her own destiny. Lacan thought the way these partialdrives combine is unique to each person, akin to a Surrealist montage, therebysafeguarding human individuality and a unique drive destiny for each person(Lacan, 1964; White, 2006, 2009). The three other Psychoanalytic Dialoguescommentators discuss Milner and Farhi’s isolation and I suggest that the idea ofbecoming psychically alone can be seen as an integral aspect of the journey ofhuman evolution, of truly coming to inhabit a mind of one’s own and of fulfill-ing, or at least coming as near to fulfilling as is humanly possible, one’s owndrive destiny (White, 2009).

In a discussion of Winnicott’s concept of essential aloneness, ChristopherBollas argues the need for psychic devolution, that is to say a dismantling of therelative safety of earlier structures as ‘. . . we move more deeply into unknow-able realms’ (Bollas, 1992, p. 242). Bollas continues, and I quote:

Some people, and perhaps they are among our artists and philosophers sense thispsycho-devolution as a fact of human life and aim to stay with it, to see if it can beaccounted for or narrated, perhaps celebrated: but the risks to such adventurers arehigh. Most people, in my view, find consciousness of this aspect of the humancondition – the complexity born of having a mind to oneself – simply too hard tobear. (ibid., p. 242)

I believe that neither Milner nor Farhi were afraid of this solitary journey andthat in many ways their isolation served their continuing growth. Nina Farhiwould have been extremely proud that her last paper was devoted to a creativeextension of Milner’s work, as she viewed this endeavour as her destiny.

However, it was also Farhi’s unique destiny to leave those of us who surviveher with the legacy of the lessons to be gleaned from her radical approach toclinical work. These lessons are particularly invaluable in work with deeplydisturbed patients, and perhaps especially with dissociative states. They are not,in my view, a prescription or blueprint for work with every patient but supple-ment and complement insights from other theorists and practitioners. So whatare these lessons that constitute Farhi’s legacy to us today?

Nina Farhi believed in working at as high a weekly analytic frequency as thepatient could tolerate.This, she thought, enabled the regressive levels of psychicinterpenetration needed to reach the deepest levels of the patient’s experienceand psychic structure and to repair them. She considered the primary and mostessential analytic quality to be that of endurance, often in the face of arduousand taxing intersubjective experiences that test the psychotherapist to herpersonal limit. Optimally, this way of working requires a re-negotiation of thepractitioner’s core issues, in the body as well as the mind, which are inseparablein Farhi’s and Milner’s idioms. This strenuous process will probably require a


countertransferential garnering, a harvesting, of the singular images uncon-sciously invented to express the core conflicts and complexes of the patient’sdilemma. Farhi thought each patient requires a personal re-working of psycho-analytic theory, with a particular orientation towards those idiosyncratic meansthrough which the patient has ensured that his innate potential for healthremains sequestered from impingement and intrusion. In Farhi’s way of under-standing the struggle not just for psychic survival but also to ensure that the trueself will some day be met and recognized, bizarre and disturbing forms ofcommunication are to be respected as are also rigid and hardened defences.Both may constitute unconscious resourcefulness in the service of the move-ment from fatedness to destiny as the template of all deep psychoanalytic work.

Farhi thought that when true self experiences come to be sensed in theintersubjective transference/countertransference matrix, the true self can beginto gather and evolve through the twin poles of the aesthetic and the moral. Shebelieved that this profoundly generative process can be best established andenabled through the unconscious interconjunction of therapist or analyst andpatient she termed ‘annealing identification’ (Farhi, 2010). Just as Milner re-created Winnicott in her own unique idiom, so too did Farhi with both Winnicottand Milner. And so she leaves us, today, with a rich and enduring legacy.

ReferencesBass, A. (2003) From imitation to spontaneous living. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39:

89–97.Benjamin, J. (1995) Like Subjects Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual

Difference. New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press.Bion, W.R. (1967) Second Thoughts. London: Karnac.Bollas, C. (1989) Forces of Destiny. London: Free Association Books.Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character. London, New York, NY: Routledge.Bowlby, R. (2011) Introduction. In: Milner, M. (as J. Field), A Life of One’s Own, pp.

xiii–xxxii. London, New York, NY: Routledge.Caldwell, L. & Joyce, A. (2011) Reading Winnicott. London and New York: Routledge.Chevetz, R. (2008) Nolens Volens Out of darkness: From the depersonal to the ‘really’

personal. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 44: 18–40.Davis, M. & Wallbridge, D. (1981) Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the Work of

D. W. Winnicott. London: Karnac.Ellman, M. (2011) Introduction. In: Milner, M. (as J. Field), An Experiment in Leisure,

pp. xiii–xlii. London, New York, NY: Routledge.Farhi, N. (date unknown) Winnicott and the concept of a healthy individual. Unpub-

lished paper.Farhi, N. (1996a) La duplication autoplastique élargie. La réproduction. Le Fait de

l’Analyse 1: 227–43.Farhi, N. (1996b) The Squiggle Foundation. Journal of Child Psychotherapy 22: 404–6.Farhi, N. (1998a) D.W. Winnicott and a personal tradition. Clinical Psychodynamics 2:

13–40.Farhi, N. (1998b) Psychotherapy and the Squiggle game: A sophisticated game of hide

and seek. Irish Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy 1: 13– 27.Farhi, N. (1998c) A tribute to Marion Milner. British Journal of Psychotherapy 15:

249–51.Farhi, N. (2000) Survivre à son destin. L’esprit de survie. Libres Cahiers pour la Psych-

analyse 1: 25–38.Farhi, N. (2003a) In her mother’s name: Imitation, a pre-identificatory mechanism of

defence. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39: 75–87.

JEAN WHITE 185

Farhi, N. (2003b) The Gaddini–Winnicott correspondence: Introduction. Psychoanalysisand History 5: 3–12.

Farhi, N. (2004) The potential space and its collapse. Clinical Psychodynamics 5: 83–106.Farhi, N. (2008a) In the beginning there was darkness: Images across the void. Contem-

porary Psychoanalysis 44: 2–17.Farhi, N. (2008b) Reply to discussions by Joyce Slochower and Richard Chevetz. Con-

temporary Psychoanalysis 44: 50–4.Farhi, N. (2010) The hands of the living God: ‘Finding the familiar in the unfamiliar’.

Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 478–503.Ferenczi, S. (1919) Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis.

London: Karnac.Fonagy, P. & Target, M. (1998) Mentalization and the changing aims of child psycho-

analysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8: 87–114.Gaddini, E. (1992) A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience. London, New York,

NY: Routledge.Goldman, D. (2010a) Letting the sea in. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 504–09.Goldman, D. (2010b) Failures, fathers, and fetal fortunes: Reply to commentaries by Avgi

Saketopoulu and Jeanne Wolff Bernstein. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 521–4.Grand, S. (2000) The Reproduction of Evil. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.Grotstein, J. (1990a) Nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, and the ‘black hole’, I.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26: 257–90.Grotstein, J. (1990b) Nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, and the ‘black hole’, II.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26: 377–407.Grotstein, J. (1995a) Orphans of the ‘real’, I: Some modern and post-modern perspec-

tives on the neurobiological and psychosocial dimensions of psychosis and primitivemental disorders. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 59: 287–311.

Grotstein, J. (1995b) Orphans of the ‘real’, II:The future of object relations theory in thetreatment of psychoses and other primitive mental disorders. Bulletin of the Men-ninger Clinic 59: 312–32.

Grotstein, J. (2003) Towards a name of her own. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39:99–106.

Haig, D. (1993) Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy. Quarterly Review of Biology 68:495–532.

Haughton, H. (2011) Introduction. In: Milner, M., Eternity’s Sunrise, pp. xi–xxxv.London, New York, NY: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1953–54) Freud’s papers on technique [Seminar I], Miller, J.-A. (ed.), trans.J. Forrester (1988). New York, NY, London: Norton.

Lacan, J. (1959–60) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoana-lysis, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Porter, D. (trans., 1992). Hove, New York, NY: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1964) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [Seminar XI], Miller,J.-A. (ed.), Sheridan, A. (trans., 1977). London and New York: Karnac, 2004.

Levi, P. (1979) If This Is a Man. London: Penguin.Milner, M. (1934) (as J. Field) A Life of One’s Own. London: Virago, 1986.Milner, M. (1937) (as J. Field) An Experiment in Leisure. London: Chatto & Windus.Milner, M. (1956) The sense in nonsense (Freud and Blake’s Job). In: Milner, M., The

Suppressed Madness of Sane Men, pp. 168–91. London, New York, NY: Tavistock, 1987.Milner, M. (1957) The ordering of chaos. In: Milner, M., The Suppressed Madness of Sane

Men, pp. 216–33. London, New York, NY: Tavistock, 1987.Milner, M. (1969) The Hands of the Living God. London: Hogarth.Milner, M. (1977) Winnicott and overlapping circles. In: Milner, M., The Suppressed

Madness of Sane Men, pp. 279–86. London, New York, NY: Tavistock, 1987.Ogden, T. H. (1994) Subjects of Analysis. London, New York, NY: Karnac.Ogden, T.H. (1997) Reverie and Interpretation. Northvale, NJ: Aronson; London: Karnac,

1999.Phillips, A. (1988) Winnicott. London: Fontana.Phillips, A. (2010) Introduction. In: Milner, M., The Hands of the Living God,

pp. xviii–xxxiv. London, New York, NY: Routledge.


Piontelli, A. (1992) From Foetus to Child: An Observational and Psychoanalytic Study.Hove, New York, NY: Brunner Routledge.

Rayner, E. (1990) The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis. London: Free Associ-ation Books.

Saketopoulou, A. (2010a) Identifications annealed, adhesive and political: Commentaryon paper by Nina Farhi. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 510–5.

Saketopoulou, A. (2010b) Befores and afters of the womb: Reply to commentaries byJeanne Wolff Bernstein and Dodi Goldman. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 525–8.

Sayers, J. (2010) Introduction. In: Milner, M., On Not Being Able to Paint, pp. xxiii–lii.London, New York, NY: Routledge.

Scholem, G. (1955) Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. London: Thames & Hudson.Searles, H. (1965) Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects. London:

Karnac.Searles, H. (1986) My Work with Borderline Patients. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.Slochower, J. (1999) Interior experience within analytic process. Psychoanalytic Dia-

logues 9: 789–909.Slochower, J. (2004) But what do you want? The location of emotional experience.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis 40: 577–602.Slochower, J. (2008) Into the whirlwind: Discussion of paper by Nina Farhi. Contempor-

ary Psychoanalysis 44: 41–9.Tustin, F. (1986) Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients. London: Karnac.Tustin, F. (1990) The Protective Shell in Children and Adults. London: Karnac.White, J. (2006) Generation: Preoccupations and Conflicts in Contemporary Psycho-

analysis. Hove, New York, NY: Routledge.White, J. (2009) The Odyssey: Contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives. British

Journal of Psychotherapy 25: 493–505.White, J. (2010) From survival to creative destiny: The psychoanalytic journey of Nina

Farhi. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 533–9.Winnicott, D.W. (1958) The capacity to be alone. In: Winnicott, D.W., The Maturational

Processes and the Facilitating Environment, pp. 29–36. London: Hogarth, 1985.Winnicott, D.W. (1962) The aims of psychoanalytic treatment. In: Winnicott, D.W., The

Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, pp. 166–70. London:Hogarth, 1985.

Winnicott, D.W. (1963) Communicating and not communicating leading to a study ofcertain opposites. In: Winnicott, D.W., The Maturational Processes and the FacilitatingEnvironment, pp. 179–92. London: Hogarth, 1985.

Winnicott, D.W. (1967) The concept of a healthy individual. In: Winnicott, D.W., Home IsWhere We Start From, pp. 21–38. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Winnicott, D.W. (1969) The use of an object and relating through identifications. In:Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, pp. 101–11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

Winnicott, D.W. (1972) Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis. London:Hogarth, 1986.

Winnicott, D.W. (1986) Home Is Where We Start From. Winnicott, C., Shepherd, R. andDavis, M. (eds). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Winnicott, D.W. (1987) The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters of D.W. Winnicott.Rodman, F.R. (ed.). Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1988) Human Nature. London: Free Association Books.Winnicott, D.W. (1989) Psychoanalytic Explorations. Winnicott, C., Shepherd, R. and

Davis, M. (eds). London: Karnac.Wolff Bernstein, J. (2010a) Nina Farhi: Leaning on an annealed identification: Commen-

tary on paper by Nina Farhi. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 516–20.Wolff Bernstein, J. (2010b) Reply to commentaries by Dodi Goldman and Avgi Sake-

topoulou. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 529–32.

JEAN WHITE 187

Documents

FINDING THE POSSIBLE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE CLINICAL AND THEORETICAL WORK OF NINA FARHI