The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2000

CONVEX AND CONCAVE, PART II:IMAGES OF EMPTINESS IN MEN1

Marilyn Charles

The theme of emptiness had been most salient for me in my work withwomen (Charles, 1999), for whom reciprocal experiences of internal empti-ness and external void are often highly charged, evoking images of creationand birth. These themes are particularly at issue for women who have notfelt ‘carried to term’ by their own mothers, and search, often with littlehope, for ways in which to feel ‘held’ within the object world. In my workwith women, images of emptiness have been evocative of the contours ofmy own physiology; the consulting room becomes the womb within whichthe self might be newly delineated in this precarious cocoon of care setwithin the larger, and often terrifying, void. As I have continued to reflecton this theme, however, I have become more aware of similar images inmy work with men, images that evoke the physical feel of being unheld inan uncaring universe, thereby configuring an internal world that cannothold the self safely or lovingly. For men, too, the counterpoints of full versusempty and touch versus absence evoke this intertwining pattern of convexand concave. There may be no experience that poses a greater challengeto the analyst than to sit with our patients in these vast, fathomless, un-found spaces. As I have done so, I have become intrigued by similaritiesand differences in men’s and women’s depictions of their experiences ofwhat have been characterized by Balint (1963) as ‘internal emptiness’ and‘external void.’

The void appears to have its origins in early deficits between infant andcaretaker, when holding is absent or unresponsive to the developing child(Stern, 1985). For our patients, the internal void becomes fashioned in theimage of the external one, and vice versa. To imagine filling either is toinvoke images of excruciating pain as the rawness of unsheathed flesh isrevealed. To admit internal emptiness is to acknowledge need, whereas toacknowledge the external void is to affirm one’s inherent unlovability inthe face of a disinterested or actively hostile universe. Early experienceswith caretakers that alternate between hostility and an appalling lack of

Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., Private Practice, Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Council.Address correspondence to Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., 325 Wildwood Drive, East Lansing, MI

48823.119

0002-9548/00/0600-0119$18.00/1 2000 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

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interest or care, evoke persecutory anxiety and empty idealizations (Klein,1952). This type of experience knows no gender boundaries.

As described more fully in Part I, the primary dyadic relationship be-comes the paradigm for all later ones. Maternal containment provides thebasis for feeling held within the object world, which in turn provides thebasis for symbolization and ‘meaning making’ (Bion, 1962; Segal, 1957;Winnicott, 1974). Insufficient containment impedes the ability to knowboth self and other, and increases vulnerability to experiences of emptiness(Grotstein, 1991), as the external void becomes translated by the child intoan internal sense of insufficiency in desperate attempts to retain some senseof being held within the object world (Fairbairn, 1952; Guntrip, 1989).

The experience of internal emptiness may pose particular problems forthe man—who must move himself out into the world to create—as op-posed to the woman, who may more easily create within the confines ofher own being. Many traditional religions reflect the disparate challengesentailed in being male versus female. Whereas the female may find Godand salvation through procreation and caretaking in this world, the man isleft to fight for salvation within the abstract regions of prayer and ritual. Forthe man who has been given too little, power often appears to reside inaffirmations of needlessness. In contrast to the woman, who seems to beable to struggle with issues of needlessness without necessarily foreclosingon affect so completely, many men seem to build a defensive wall aroundthe core feeling self in an attempt to deny potentially overwhelming feelingsof vulnerability, sorrow, and rage. In this way, emptiness becomes a valiant,primordial determination to defy need. One variant of this wish may befound in the desire to transcend the bounds of the flesh and move into therealm of the mystics. This is the grand void of the Eastern religions in whichfullness is but illusion and emptiness contains within it the possibility of allthings. This notion is evocative of Bion’s (1967) ‘saturated idea,’ in whichthere is no room for meaning to become manifest, or Lacan’s (1964) distinc-tion between the signifier and that which is signified, lest meaning be con-densed and collapsed beyond perceptibility.

This disjunction between feeling and reason tends to be more pervasivein men, severely impeding their ability to know self and other. I have foundthat women are less likely to be so thoroughly cut off from their affectivecore; they exhibit more of a tendency to move back and forth betweenfeeling and not feeling, shutting down when overwhelmed and yet main-taining some capacity for differentiation and registration of affect as such.For men, in contrast, there is a greater prevalence of more chronic feeling-lessness. For the infant, whose early origins are contiguous with the physi-cal presence of the mother in profoundly different ways than that of thefather, the father’s greater distance may be experienced as void. The male

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child is under greater injunction to differentiate from the early rhythms ofattunement through which the affective self, most particularly, becomesknown, and to identify with the more remote father. In this way, for themale child the void may loom larger and with greater imminence.

There is both a maternal and paternal nature to the void. That holdingpresence which carries both the sense of ‘mother,’ as primary containment,and the sense of ‘father,’ who connects us with the world, becomes a proto-type for the Divine (Grotstein, 1979, 1991). The mother and father togetherprovide the primary holding that both reassures us of our own presencewithin the world, and also gives meaning to our experiences of ourselvesin the world. Meaning is built within the linkings of object to object, ideato idea, and self to other, developed in the interactions between motherand infant in their reciprocal relationships as container and contained(Bion, 1962, 1963). Without the feeling of being held within the objectworld, we are more vulnerable to experiences of emptiness or nothingness,which Grotstein (1990, 1991) terms the ‘black hole.’ The black hole is boththat which holds and supports, and also that with which one longs to makecontact but cannot. More terrifying still are images of black hole as thatwhich would engulf and annihilate us—should we dare to come too close(Eshel, 1998). The absent parent often becomes a demon god whose veryabsence becomes an affirmation of our worthlessness, to whom we payhomage, and to whom we attempt restitution (Kavaler-Adler, 1995).

The absence of the mother in early childhood may be the most intolera-ble narcissistic injury, predisposing the individual to experiences of empti-ness and the void. For one young man, his mother’s recurrent absencesduring his childhood left a sense of unutterable emptiness. ‘Nick’ is a youngman in his mid-twenties, who tries valiantly to be self-sufficient. He appearsto be haunted by the dual terrors of his tantalizing/devouring mother andhis more available, yet ineffectual father. Nick tells me, “It’s odd, becausewhen I think about my childhood home, I think of her being there; sheseems to be a part of it. But when I think about my childhood itself, Ithink of her being gone. She was never there.” Nick has been tormentedby tremendous anxiety and violent aggressive urges that permeate hisdreams and waking life. At the end of a recent hour, I had referred to hisanxiety.

“Anxiety?” he pondered. “What makes you think of anxiety?”“You seem to be worrying a great deal,” I replied.When he returned for the next session, this interaction had been pressing

upon him.“When you said that, about worries,” he said, “it really bothered me.

You were right, I worry all the time, but somehow I never connected it withanxiety. I’m noticing it now, and it’s different from being nervous. I feel

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dizzy and my head perspires. I was buying some gum this morning on myway here and someone came up behind me and I could barely stand it.”His anxiety was also appearing in his dreams in the form of a great whiteshark who had already eaten his grandmother (another worrier) and was inthe process of eating him when he awoke.

I wondered about the person behind him in the store. I had a sense of amale presence. Nick identifies most with his father, and yet rejects thisidentification with the man who was in many ways his only functionalparent, but who had also failed, dramatically and repeatedly, in both hispersonal and professional lives. In Nick’s depictions, his father stands un-comfortably close behind him, threatening to become him. Nick feels terri-bly conspicuous when he is with his family, and is afraid of being identifiedas one of them. He has writhed against the image of his father’s failure bytrying to surpass him. At age fifteen, Nick began his own business, an en-deavour in which he still is engaged. And yet, in counterpoint, he alsopursues his own dreams, which are in many ways thwarted by the ongoingneed to affirm that he can succeed in the domain in which his father failed.In this way, he assures himself that he is not his father by becoming/over-coming him. In a sense, he becomes God, thereby usurping the territory ofGod. There is terror in that, as well as mystification and awe as one movesinto that space of conflict and conquest. Fantasies of emptiness becomefantasies of becoming the masculine God who will find a vehicle for hisneeds, a container for his fears, and a conduit toward his immortality. Canhe hope to fill a woman in that way, or would he be engulfed if he wereto try? Nick comes up against images of woman as goddess, always toolarge, too vast, for his small self to be able to interpenetrate, much less tofill. His vast smallness at times seems ludicrous, and becomes hidden,masked by his murderous rage.

Despite suggestions that women more often report feelings of emptinessthan do men (Balint, 1963; Erikson, 1950), I find this theme to be salient inmy work with men, as well, although it may take somewhat different forms.For Nick, it became important to be the father he had not had, so that hemight rescue the mother who had not been able to be there for him. Thismay be one facet of the ‘rescue fantasy,’ in which one rescues oneself fromone’s own sense of vast and utter emptiness, both within and without. Inthis way, Nick also appears to rescue himself from his guilt for havingwished to replace his own absent mother with the very present and avail-able mother of a friend.

In Nick’s family home denial reigns king. It is not permitted to speak tothe vast failures perpetrated by one family member on another, nor to theimmense hurt suffered by each at the hands of the others. The pain seepsout in psychosomatic symptoms and lightning crashes of anger. The lies

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leave Nick reeling in a surrealistic play on existence. And so, Nick writesabout what could never be said directly, creating a world of true fantasy tocombat the incoherent reality he endures within the family circle. For Nick,the void had its origins in a lack of acknowledgment of the actuality of hisexperience. This type of disconfirmation of the child’s reality is devastatingto the developing sense of self, and also inhibits the child’s ability to per-ceive and sustain meaning, resulting in what Balint (1963) has described asthe reciprocal experiences of internal emptiness and external void.

Nick describes his enjoyment of small spaces in which he would confinehimself as a child. For a long period, he had an appliance box in his closet,which would become his world, his ‘psychic retreat,’ as Steiner (1993) putit. Even now, Nick longs for some small space within which he can bothconfine and ‘fit’ himself, leaving out the rest of the world. He now createsthese spaces within his writing. It is as though he must have some smallspace within which to give birth to himself, in place of the abortive attemptsof his mother many years before. Within the paucity of the parenting hereceived, he has been forced to become his own parent, and strugglesthrough his own awkward attempts to bring himself to life, constrained bythe parental failures. It appears to be only within the confines of his rela-tionship with his wife, and within the analytic setting, that his own realitiesare capable of being endured. Even though he has gone through great trialsto remain in analysis with me, through changes in location and finances,he creates in the work a largely empty space within which I am suffered totravel along with him. He can only allow me in to the extent that I do notdemand entry.

Nick has both the capacity and the need to be in relationship to another.However, this need is accompanied by great terror of loss and abandon-ment. For Nick, the loss appears to be the loss of meaning via the loss ofthe positively valued aspect of the other—much as has happened in hisrelationship with his father. In contrast, the sense of abandonment inheresin his relationship with his mother. In this way, his primary sense of related-ness is linked to both chaos and emptiness. He recurrently looks for ‘home’within his family, but cannot tolerate what he finds there. And so, he findshimself caught between his tremendous yearnings for a home and the terri-ble reality of what ‘home’ has meant for him. This space becomes, for Nick,the void, which he can never resolve. He fills his mind with his ‘worries,’working them like rosary beads within his consciousness, poring over themsilently and relentlessly like some half-remembered mantra, holding themin his mind to ward off the unrelenting void, ever at his heels.

Nick finds what safety he can with his women. These most often comein pairs; his wife, who is real, and safe, and solid, and some other woman,who is mysterious, seductive, and dangerous. I have played that latter role

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for him for several years. For Nick, the role of the seductress is entwinedwith images of his absent mother, convalescing in her bed, nestling closeto her son. No matter how I fail him, it has been essential for him to haveme here, where he might find himself in my presence. It is as though I fillsome gap that is more safely filled by an ‘untouchable’ analyst than by themore dangerously seductive others who had previously filled this role.

Men and women each seem to entertain the fantasy that their emptinessshould, and somehow must, be filled by an other who becomes in fantasya ‘transformative object’ (Bollas, 1987) who can save us from ourselves.Most often the other is of the opposite gender, as though there is someportion of ourselves that is, indeed, ‘other,’ and cannot be filled fromwithin. Within the cultural illusions of masculine, active aggression versusfeminine, passive reception, both men and women suffer. Men are depictedas the active intruders, devoid of emotion, and fearing the contaminationof the other as though vulnerability to the affect of the other would drownthem completely. The heroes in our childhood tales are impervious to pain;they move out into the world to cut down the overgrowth, save the prin-cess, and reclaim the castle. They are never penetrated; they never ac-knowledge pain. This may be the other side of the emptiness, in which onemoves fearfully yet unrelentingly out into the void, needing to slay what-ever dragons may come, with only a child’s sword to hand.

As I have tried to understand experiences of emptiness in men, I havebeen struck by its less palpable nature for me. Both anatomy and destinymay impede my view. However, one facet appears to be the man’s devel-opmental task of identification with an absent parent. When the mother isunable to bring the father into the early parent-child dyad symbolicallythrough her ‘holding’ (Winnicott, 1971a) or ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1967), the ‘fa-ther’ may become the void. The capacity to symbolize—Ogden’s (1994)vital ‘third’—is created in the interweavings of mother and child. Symbolicthought permits the transformation of archaic anxieties, becoming a bufferfrom both the engulfing/annihilating ‘mother’ and the absent, disintegratingvoid of the ‘father,’ in this manner, both separating and linking the child to‘other’ (Arvanitakis, 1985). Arvanitakis (1985) suggested that it is thethought of the father that opens up the potential space of the Symbolic. Inthe construction and destruction of the other, the self is held, thereby be-coming able to hold both self and other (Ogden, 1985; Winnicott, 1965–1969, 1971a).

For men, it may be particularly important to destroy the mythical propor-tions of the subjective object (Grotstein, 1997; Winnicott, 1971a) withoutdestroying the real other, in order to be able to be connected to both otherand to self. In many ways, this is the task of analysis—to disrupt one’shabitual version of the thing and move beyond one’s expectations toward

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greater potentialities (Grotstein, 1997). However, for those for whom thevoid seems imminent, there is both terror and the urge to destroy the osten-sible originator of that terror. One phantasm within the darkness is the im-age of the vagina dentata, in which our rage at the mother threatens toengulf us. Whereas for a woman there may be the comforting feel of a lackof teeth in our inner regions, the man has no such internal reassurance toobviate the necessity of surviving the ravages of excoriations of claws andteeth. The task becomes to be transformed through suffering.

Men are caught between the siren’s lure and the terror of engulfment;the siren’s comb tears the flesh, evoking images of Christ’s passions. Withinthis rubric, the notion of emptiness as void may become a reassuring refugein which there are no harsh teeth with which to be shredded. Much asthe child assuages his fears through enactments in play, we work towardabsolution of the sins of both separateness and symbiotic devouring needby ‘reclaiming’ the self through the object (Krystal, 1988). This ritual is mostnotably epitomized in the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the absent‘other’ is eaten and internalized. The sacrament becomes the sacrifice ofself to other that one might ultimately survive in some fashion. This bothreaffirms our sin and absolves us of it; we are eaten and reborn via the‘communion’ between self and deity (Freud, 1913; Andresen, 1984). AsGrotstein (1997) has put it: “In ritualistically recommitting the destructiveact on Christ, the synecdochic sacrifice for all mankind, the sinner becomesabsolved and is restored to innocence” (italics in original, p. 202). Withinthis notion inheres the idea that man can be transformed—reborn—through his own ingestion of the male deity. The man becomes his soleparent through this reenactment of the virgin birth. Both the pain and thepower of the mother are thereby denied, reaffirming her position as voidand ultimately, as terror.

The theme of emptiness has been salient in my work with another youngman, whom I will call ‘Simon.’ Simon’s mother committed suicide whenhe was 15 months old, and he has searched for her echoes ever since. Hisworld resounds with people who might have been holding him in theirminds, but their images of him degenerate and he is left alone, self-con-scious in his humiliation. His eyes lower as he recalls his father’s disavow-ing stare at young Simon’s inability to fight off the rageful attacks of a newstepbrother. The silence of the other seems to reverberate against the wellof emptiness within himself. Simon has not found the right words fromwhich to create the echoing response that will leave him feeling held withinthe object world. In the analytic hour, the analyst’s silence can coalescewith the existent emptiness, compounding it to intolerable levels. At thosemoments, Simon asks for some sign from me that I am with him in someway, any way, even if this means provoking my anger.

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Simon’s depressed mother was unable to sustain his illusion of being ableto evoke her. To the contrary, she disappeared completely at just the pointin his development when he would have been moving out into the worldmore separately, needing her echo to assure him of his safety. In the trans-ference, Simon struggles with his need for my echoes, and with how heloses himself when I can’t find him. We are in that precarious world inwhich he can only truly find himself through others and yet cannot toleratehis tremendous dependency when it reveals itself to him. For Simon, thatis the distinguishing sign emblazoned on his forehead, marking him as tooneedy to be loved, leaving him wandering alone in a desert. He fears anddenies the tremendous yearnings for love, comfort, and affection that risein him, as though those would be the very things that would condemn himto a life of loneliness. This young man must have known love, for he recog-nizes it and is pulled toward it, but he also fears its lure and tries to subdueit with rules and doctrines of abstinence and moderation, perhaps to atonefor whatever sins have brought this curse upon him.

At the age of 15 months, a child is learning to find himself in space. Heachieves this through the reverberations of himself on his world, engagingthe responding echoes of primary caretakers—for this young man, hismother. When the echoes become silence, as when Simon was passed fromthe hands of his mother to those of his grandmother, there abides a re-sounding emptiness that is never quite filled. Simon’s grandmother (s)moth-ered him, trying to fill her own emptiness as she attempted to fill the voidthat had been his mother’s love. However, his grandmother’s love, in con-trast, became an enforced filling of his world with herself. The price wasthe exclusion of his primary objects; not only was his mother lost, but hisfather was lost, very profoundly, as well, through his inability to find hisson through his own hurt and anger, and through the grandparents’ needto denigrate the son who had turned away from them.

The son, my patient’s father, had become lost in the smothering love ofhis own mother, leaving him little means for being found, or for being trulypresent with another human being. This resulted in a series of lost ‘mothers’for my patient, as he was dragged backward and forward in a bitter war forhis custody that lasted his entire childhood. No ‘mother’ can be trulytrusted, and yet, the hope of each new mother arouses intense and over-whelming yearnings from within, followed by the pain of betrayal as hisneeds become overshadowed by those of the ‘mother.’ This manifests inthe transference as intense engagement alternating with periods of distanceand disorientation as he tries to get his bearings within this relationship,which in some ways promises the hope of fulfillment of his childhood fan-tasies, and in others affirms that these will never be fulfilled. For Simon, thestruggle has been to not-need what he cannot have. To be found wanting

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is the awful humiliation that annihilates the fragile structure he has createdof himself. The world is replete with promise; female figures populate thelandscape of his soliloquies, but are either available, devalued, and pa-thetic (like his grandmother), or, alternatively, appealing and seemingly outof reach (like his mother[s]), leaving himself as the devalued and disparagedempty object. He tries to create order through prohibitions and proscrip-tions; he tries to become need-less—one who is empty with no need ofbeing filled. In this way, he valiantly responds to the cry of the mystic,striving to reverberate to the echoing silence.

For an infant with no responsive parent to soothe him, any feeling maybe experienced as too much, or ‘bad,’ as the child becomes overwhelmedby his own affect (Schore, 1994). Krystal (1987) has noted how empathicfailures in attunement make it difficult for meaning to be shared and sus-tained. At a more fundamental level, they also impede the establishment ofa coherent sense of self, developing instead what Winnicott (1956) referredto as a ‘pseudo-self,’ depicted as a “collection of innumerable reactions toa succession of failures of adaptation” (p. 386). For Simon, the yearningsfor holding are quite palpable and have been particularly confusing for him.These had been exacerbated by the warm, playful interactions between hissecond stepmother and oldest stepbrother, which his father termed ‘incestu-ous,’ in this way barring Simon once more from the intimacy of a mother’sholding. To deny the yearning, he aligned with his father’s revulsion,thereby further distancing himself from his own experience (Shabad, 1993).It is difficult for him now to be touched by any woman without the feelingthat it is wrong. With older women, in particular, the condemnation is swiftand severe, and yet he longs for contact and imagines how it might beobtained.

In many ways, the father becomes lost for Simon as well. In a recentsession, the discussion focused around his struggles to hold on to the goodaspects of his relationship with his father while letting go of his unrequitedwish to be parented. He was silent for a while. I found myself wanderingoff, and wondered where he had wandered off to. When I asked, he seemeda bit embarrassed, as though ‘caught’ somehow. “I wasn’t thinking aboutanything that had to do with anything,” he said. “And yet, it must, in somefashion,” I replied. Somewhat reluctantly, he began to tell me where hehad been: “Your flowers caught my attention from the periphery of myvision,” he said. “Then I was looking at the glass sculpture you have thereand here, and how carefully everything is placed, and wondering if youever let your kids come in here and wondering what they would make ofit all. It would seem so mysterious; I imagine them wondering what goeson in here—why two clocks?—or the box of tissues.”

“Perhaps you wondered what it would be like for you?” I suggested.

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“Yeah,” he said. “When I was a kid, my parents had a friend who wasChinese-Japanese. She was a Buddhist and had a shrine in her basement,in the far room. You had to go through two doors to get there, and it alwayssmelled of incense. She had a big black box in there, and every once in awhile I would catch a glimpse of her at prayer and smell the incense andhear the tinkling of the bells. It was such a mystery then.”

“I’m wondering if you wish you could find the mystery again,” I said.“What do you men?” he asked.“I wonder if you miss the part of you that found it all so mysterious and

enthralling,” I said.“Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”For Simon, the world seems in many ways to be ‘off limits.’ He is bright

and perceptive and eager to learn, but is also frightened of encounteringonce again the limits imposed by what he experiences as vast ongoingdeficits. For Simon, the question of whether meaning can be sustained is avital one. He does not know whether he can sustain the meaning of histhoughts and words in the face of potentially opposing views. He findsabstract symbols and signs particularly difficult to take in and utilize. Theyare seen by him as ‘not-me,’ the province of those ‘healthy’ others who areable to metabolize the pieces. Simon speaks longingly of his wish to knowsomething that will please/appease his father. In the needing to know forthe other comes the annihilation of meaning for self, that becomes, in turn,the annihilation of self. He becomes unable to maintain the links that con-nect one thought to the next, or one person to another (Bion, 1967; Volkan,1981). “I’ve been losing the point of things,” he says, “I’ll be talking aboutsomething I know about in class and I’ll lose a word and be afraid I don’treally know anything.” As his meaning opposes that of the other, it losessubstance and becomes impalpable, unknowable—literally imponderablein the moment. As the space collapses, meaning becomes void.

It is difficult for Simon to affirm his own sense of things in the face ofdiffering opinions of others. He tends to lose himself and finds it particularlydifficult to imagine that anyone will ever reliably be there for him. Recently,he began to talk about how much his lateness and procrastination are both-ering him. He has been late to work a great deal, he said, but no one hassaid anything. “I almost wish that they would. Then I would be able to getmyself there.”

“I’m wondering if you do this as a way of making sure that someone isthere,” I said.

“Is this some sort of symptom with people like me?” he asked.“I see it more as you playing with the whole issue of people being there

and being gone, as a way to master it,” I said. “You were so young whenyour mother disappeared; you had no way of making sense of it. At that

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age, it must have been unclear whether it was you or she who disap-peared.”

Simon said that he had always been uncertain about his feelings in child-hood, particularly his tears. His father, in particular, had become very re-mote when Simon would cry. In those moments, Simon would feel asthough he were collapsing entirely. He went on to speak about an incidentfrom his childhood, when he had been at school late, and had come out-side to find that darkness had fallen.

I had never ridden my bike home in the dark, so I waited for my (step)mother tocome. But she never came. So I started to walk home, and I was crying, andsome policemen stopped and gave me a ride home. My mother was angry forbeing put on the spot. She said I should have just ridden home. When my fathercame home, I fell apart completely. All I could say was, ‘I screwed up. I screwedup,’ as though I was retarded, as my mother often intimated. After that, I didn’twait for her anymore. But I knew that my father would respond to my crying,though he didn’t often. He would just kind of look at me like he was ashamed,usually. It was only my grandparents who would respond to my distress, so thatsometimes it was hard to tell if it was really real, or just something I did.

Recently, Simon came for a session on the wrong day. It was early in themorning and my waiting room door was still locked. I saw him riding hisbicycle away from the house, and wondered how it had felt to him to havemy office door shut to him. He wondered the next day whether I had seenhim, and talked about how it had felt to be closed out. He said he comesinto my waiting room as though it is the door to another universe. At timeswhen he arrives late, it is difficult for him to get his bearings. He tells methat he needs some time to leave the facade of that world behind, to divesthimself of his protective skin in order to truly enter this world. In the mo-ment, he must also begin to distinguish between the fantasy of the relation-ship and that which he encounters when he steps through the door.

Simon tries to hold the space within his mind, configuring it internally,as though to preserve its power within. As he moves into the space, thepainfully acknowledged emptiness opens into an intolerable mourning forthat which cannot be filled, for the void that cannot be subdued, and forthe yearning that can neither be soothed nor quieted. Within the work,in the interplay between analyst and analysand, the need is held. Its edgesare smoothed, its depths are sounded and resounded, and the echoes be-come the hope of being held. The hope that one’s interminable intolerableneed might be bounded, might be contained, becomes the hope that wemight one day contain it within our self: that we might become the self thatsoothes the self that sorrows.

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The theme of emptiness has also been prominent in my work with an-other young man, whom I will call Aron, after a young boy in a story whospent his childhood reappearing before his parents, hoping to finally catchthe sparkle in their gaze that would truly hold him in the world, and therebyenable him to finally grow (Grossman, 1991). My ‘Aron’ is in his late twen-ties. He is single and lives alone. He works in a large bureaucracy and feelsextremely alienated within that setting. His stories are reminiscent of Kaf-ka’s tales of being lost in a cold and meaningless machine. Aron has notheard of Kafka. This was to be the first of myriad metaphors we did notshare; our internal landscapes appear to be configured too differently, im-peding the sharing and sustaining of meaning.

Aron was adopted as an infant. He has visible deformities and conjec-tures that he may have been a thalidomide baby. His sister appears to havebeen the one person who tried to soothe him and to interpret to him thefamily drama. However, both of his siblings were substantially older andwere gone from home by the time he was 7. Aron has few memories ofchildhood; his mother was hospitalized frequently (he depicts her as psy-chotically depressed, extremely reclusive, and paranoid) and his father, aphysician, worked long hours. Aron’s late childhood and early adolescencewere set within the vacuum of a darkening room with only the flicker ofthe television for company, until his father’s spark of irritation at returninghome to find young Aron unprepared once again, with no dinner waiting.

Aron was not allowed to acknowledge physical limitations or differences.As I sit with him I wonder what it was like for him to have been not-seen,and to insist, even now, on being not-seen. When I asked Aron how hisphysical handicaps had affected his childhood, he was distressed by myquestion, and let me know that most people did not appear to notice them.It was as though I had failed a very basic test, in which people who careabout him do not see those parts of him, nor their absence. I wonderedwhat else I was not supposed to see, and also what this whole issue ofseeing and not-seeing has meant for him in other ways. I wonder how hisparents looked at him, and whether anyone, aside from his sister, ever re-ally caught his gaze and held it. For the first year or so of our work together,Aron made little eye contact aside from brief instants wrought with painfuland terrified determination. It was as though his eyes were black emptyholes through which I might divine his utter shame at being seen.

Aron’s mother appears to have viewed other people as hostile, critical,and dangerous, a view she bequeathed to her son. He has felt very rejectedby his parents. He says that when they talk, he feels as though he might beanyone, as though he has no substance, no value beyond filling the space,a feeling he certainly evokes in me. His grandiose, hostile fantasies makeit difficult for him to make any contact with others at all; in our work, one

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of us must be stupid and reviled in the face of the other’s greater knowl-edge. He repeatedly points out to me my failures; I have nothing of anysubstance to offer him. He enjoys these momentary triumphs, but then isdevastated by the ensuing loneliness. Those few times when we do workcollaboratively have been inevitably followed by vast distance. Looking atthis pattern together has helped to temper it; there is some acknowledgmentthat I might possibly be helpful in some fashion, and yet he finds me inher-ently untrustworthy. If I really knew anything, I would attack him with it.Relying on me is beyond imagining.

Unlike Simon, for whom there had been holding and then withdrawal,for Aron there is little sense of ever having been held lovingly in the world.He carefully and methodically annihilates any care he might receive fromme, and reworks me into an automaton or remote ‘doctor,’ thereby creatingof himself the automaton. I become one more obstacle in his path, the sirenluring him with empty promises toward certain destruction. I am envied formy lack of pain, hated for my lack of compassion. The lack of compassionis important, for compassion would be experienced as demeaning, andtherefore cannot be allowed to exist. The only safety comes in keeping theother at bay—where one may safely hate and envy and deplore—leavingus each lost in the vacuity of the space, like two empty planets that occa-sionally collide and then ricochet wildly, as he watches with terror hisworld becoming ever more empty and remote. In the darkness of the empti-ness that surrounds Aron, there are unseen and unnamed monsters lurkingand circling, biding their time, waiting to pounce. Perhaps that is betterthan the other side of the emptiness, when he is alone and there is only theunremitting void that threatens to engulf him. He tells me in subtle ways ofhis fears of going mad like his mother. He is terrified of going over someedge from which he can never return.

For Aron, being with others appears to be an impossible task. In ourhours together, he often excludes me by talking over my words, or endinga silence just as I move to speak. Paradoxically, he also yearns for mywords, asking me to tell him what I see, so that he might see things differ-ently, as well. However, even when he hears my words they tend to dissi-pate quickly; he often cannot recollect them seconds after their trace hasleft the air. This experience is accompanied by an inevitable sense of loss,as he laments his inability to hold on to that which he experiences as im-portant or meaningful in his life. My words, as connecting links, appear tocombust spontaneously within the toxicity of the atmosphere, much as hisdeveloping comfort within the session is annihilated and dis-rememberedby the time he once more enters the space. In this way, our relationship—and nonrelationship—is created anew in every hour. In the ebbs and flowsof our sessions over time, there is this coming together and being propelled

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explosively apart, as though we had never been together at all. Aron com-plains of losing information; what had been known in one moment is nolonger known in the next. I become responsible for keeping the fragments,and yet, in the moment, I do not know what he does not know, only thathe loses pieces and that this act of losing and being lost telescopes back-ward in time and outward toward infinity.

I find this young man tremendously difficult to follow. His stories tend tobe overly detailed without clear referents. I become lost in an austere jungleof undifferentiated managers, family members, and auxiliary players, withno connecting links, signposts, or milestones along the way to help meget my bearings. This appears to me to be the patterned chaos of Aron’sinterpersonal world. He is lost in a labyrinth of deconstructed and ominousportents of indecipherable meaning, counterpoint to the empty spaces weinhabit together.

At the end of a recent session, Aron announced that he had succeededin setting things up so that I am unable to help him; he had immobilizedme. I told him that I found his remark very interesting, and he wonderedwhy. I replied that it was one of the few times he had given me any indica-tion of how he viewed our relationship, or indeed, that we had one, andthat I thought it would be worth discussing further. He seemed both inter-ested and pleased, and left. When he returned for the following session,however, I could find no sign of this particular thread. I am certain it musthave been there in some form, and yet I failed to detect it. Perhaps whatwas there of it, most profoundly, was its absence. What shifted to the fore-ground was the utter futility of speech. He had nothing to say, he said; itwas just the same things over and over.

In this way, I am called to account repeatedly by this man. He is in pain.He is miserable. He needs help and is certain that I could provide it if onlyI would. Yet, for some reason of my own, whether stupidity or sadism, Irefuse him. I leave him in his misery, searching hopelessly for some keythat might open the door. And yet, he has none. Only his internal dialogue,which he puts before me over and over, to no apparent end. Speakingbecomes the seemingly endless, and apparently useless, reiteration of histribulations at work and at home. At times he speaks, at others he is silent,as though it is of no consequence whether he speaks aloud or to himself. Iexperience this hopelessness as a commentary on my lack of helpfulness,his utter aloneness, and his relief at the lack of contact.

One image in particular stands out from our work together. It was fromthe only fragment of a dream that Aron has reported to me. In it, there wasa black mask which was very lively and animated. He was drawn to put iton, but resisted. He had the sense that he had not resisted in the past. Howdifficult it is for this man to stand naked before me, without the mask of

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pretense he stood behind for the first year and a half of our work together.The emptiness inside mirrors the emptiness outside. Recently, he was de-spairing over his utter lack of self-esteem. I said that I had the sense thatwhen he looked for affirmation from outside, he was faced only with a hallof mirrors that echoed back his own internal self-loathing. It must havebeen so hard for him to learn to esteem himself in the absence of the joyin his parents’ eyes that would have mirrored for him their delight in watch-ing him grow.

“I always had the fantasy of being found,” he told me. There is more eyecontact these days. He settles into his chair with less discomfort, and doesnot seem quite so banished at the imposition of the end of the hour.

For Aron, the possibility of a nonjudgmental mirror is a remote one, andyet is one for which he searches in our hours together. For many, manymonths, as each new hour came and he began to tell me of his utter hope-lessness, I imagined that this would be the time when he would quit. Al-though he has been disappointed that our work has not resulted in palpablechanges in his life, he has been unable to express any anger toward me.Recently, I asked him what it would be like to express his anger. He lookedat me helplessly. “I can’t even imagine it,” he replied. “I could talk aboutit in the abstract, but I don’t feel anything.” I realized in that moment thatI had been imaging capacities within this man that he could not find withinhimself. And so, I said, “What would it be like if I were to tell you howangry you must be towards me, now that you have wasted so much timeand money on this work which seems to be taking you nowhere?” Aronbegan to respond as though he were me. He caught himself, and smiled.“Now I’m saying what you would say,” he said, and would go no further.

My attempts toward empathy may take away Aron’s ability to be withhis own feelings in the moment. In searching for him, I may hold him atbay. I told him that I was reminded of his comment about immobilizingme; it has been important for him to be able to assure himself of his ownability to control the process, in order to keep at bay his terror at movinginto the unknown. Although he could make it hopeless, it didn’t have tobe hopeless. If he wanted to engage in the struggle, I was willing to strugglewith him. Perhaps what leads Aron to persevere in spite of the awful pau-city he has found in our work together is the threat of the void, which islessened in some measure by my willingness to journey through it alongwith him.

What was yearned for and not found in infancy becomes the void. It isboth familiar and ineffable, and often has the feel, as Novick and Novick(1996) have described in another context, of ‘home.’ It therefore becomesdifficult to move beyond the safety of the encompassing womb—no matterhow toxic or empty it might be. The void has many textures, many dimen-

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sions, and many meanings. It interplays between internal and external ex-periences of vast and utter emptiness. At times, it carries the imprint of alost parent, recurrently un-found; at times it echoes the keening for losttime, lost opportunities—the unlived moments and years of a lifetime (J. S.Grotstein, personal communication, October 1997).

It can be extremely arduous to sit with our patients in these dark, emptyspaces. However, it is often our silence in those moments that offers thepatient the opportunity to discover his or her own truths (Winnicott,1971b). This can necessitate an inner struggle on the part of the analyst tomaintain “an undefensive, open attentiveness to the emotional reality of asubject, his truth, [that] comes in fierce conflict with inclinations that fightagainst it” (Eigen, 1981, pp. 430–431). Acknowledging the emptiness bymoving into the void entails making contact with the harsh edges of ourown smallness and envy, and the desperation of utter unfillable need. Theausterity of this barren landscape may be dark and chilling, or flooded inthe harsh light of unforgiving judgment. Whatever its form, our own abilityto sit with it becomes a vehicle for moving within it, which becomes, inturn, the hope of metamorphosis into a space with greater resilience andcapacity for holding.

As I struggle to understand the differences between the images of empti-ness that come into my work with men versus women, I am struck first, ata very primitive level, by the sameness; we all come into a world in whichwe are filled and emptied according to the rhythms of others who may bemore or less attuned, available, assaultive, or intrusive. As the experienceof emptiness becomes more differentiated, I am struck by its more palpablenature, for me, with women. The internal sense of it is alive; it has heat,whereas with men it feels more remote. Perhaps that speaks more to mylack of connection to their experience than to their own; I look to the voicesof men to help me better understand this issue. But, perhaps, part of whatis different is the terrain upon which the narrative is patterned. For women,avoidance of the void is often enacted through the body, as in the anorex-ic’s abstention from taking in. Alternatively, like the bulimic, we may besated in our emptiness, vomiting up the chaos of intolerable affect into thevastness of the void.

In contrast, for the men I have described, the body becomes that whichmight fill the space (or dares not), evoking images of a sacrament in whichthe hero is eternally consumed, and in which the labyrinth that obstructsis, at the same time, the very path toward salvation (Campbell, 1988). Thefocus within the work is somewhat different; it becomes about whether onemight fill the space without becoming lost, engulfed, or annihilated. Thismay manifest, as it did for Simon, as an abstract intentness upon organizingand finding a place within the mysterious maze of the object world, in

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enigmatic symbols and signs, enticingly redolent with the potentiality ofunknown meanings. Alternatively, Nick attempted to create a world inwhich the players were all merely figments of his imagination. He has beendisturbed by the growing awareness of the emptiness of the object worldhe has been complicit in creating. “I never think people understand whatI’m saying,” he said. “I’m never really there in the conversation. I’m alwayslooking on, evaluating. No one ever seems to really understand. But then,I think that it’s really a stretch to imagine that no one, in all this time, hasever understood me. I think about my friend Kathy, and how she would sayshe understood. And maybe, in retrospect, she did. Maybe I just couldn’thear it. And now she’s gone.”

Simon and Nick, each in their own way, search for whatever codes willunlock the secrets of the universe. My female patients also search for theseelusive understandings, though perhaps in somewhat different ways. Themale and female elements would seem to exist in all of us, in our move-ments toward the outer and the inner spaces. To the extent that either path-way is blocked, we are diminished in our attempts to know both self andother. The path to real fullness of being may lie in the acknowledgment ofour essential aloneness (Eigen, 1981; Winnicott, 1963). Kristeva (1986) pos-its the locus of the true self in this essential aloneness, which she sees asthe point where emptiness and narcissism meet. When we are willing toabstain from precipitously filling the void with the refuse of our own anxi-ety, we offer up the possibility that it might be filled with something of realvalue. As we become the context of our own understanding, we create thepossibility of meaningful communication, thereby bringing our selves intothe outer world. It may be relatively more common for the female to be-come lost inside herself and for the male to become lost outside. However,wholeness entails the elaboration of both interior and exterior, and an un-derstanding of the interplay between the reciprocal experiences of convexand concave.

Both men and women appear to search in one another for the codes thatmight unlock the secrets within, much as we have searched without for thatwhich should have echoed and resounded throughout our earliest mo-ments, yet were too often still or speaking in some harsh and jarring coun-terpoint. For children who have become lost in his endeavour, there areongoing attempts to try to create order and melody from cacophonousstreams emanating from an unresponsive environment. The order is oftenbizarre and contingent upon presumed deficits within the creator/child.There is no one with whom to play, and no one with whom to interplayone mind, one melody, on an other. The analytic enterprise becomes thelaborious construction of a dyad between two individuals who, initially, donot even speak the same language and have little means for touching one

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another without intense pain. For the analyst, it entails the ability to sit withall the storm and havoc of uncontained early years; the ostensible ariditybecomes a gateway against all the mess that could never be sifted through,all the rage and the despair (Wrye, 1993). As we begin to define sharedwords and meanings—to find and re-find them anew—our attempts to holdmeaning also represents our attempts to gird and reassure ourselves againstthe impending chaos of the unexamined void.

Emptiness is an integral part of being human. Perhaps, optimally, welearn to encapsulate this emptiness and move on in spite of it, or alterna-tively, to sublimate it toward some greater goal that, in some sense, justifiesour existence and obviates the need for despair. In another sense, however,emptiness is also our destiny. It is that toward which we move inexorably;it is our future. With each passing day, we move closer toward that un-known and unknowable void that waits beyond the world we know. Wecome from emptiness, and move toward it, carrying its essence within us.It is that which waits to fill or be filled—with another, with ourselves, orwith great works, wisdom, or actions. And yet, very profoundly, this fillingmust always remain an illusion; there will be a part of this emptiness thatby its very nature cannot be filled. The extent of the emptiness may deter-mine its scope; too much deprivation makes it very difficult to skirt theedges and not fall in, over and over and over again. It is as though in ourinfancies we must absorb enough love, warmth, and soothing into our tis-sues to cushion the blows we take over the years; those of us with lesscushion can only look on in envy at those more fortunate, and work over-time to pad our meager resources, or perhaps try to remedy them. Andthen, as analysts, we look toward those struggling before us, and continuethe slow and painful work of titrating molecules of moisture into dry andparched tissue in our attempts to sit with the emptiness and hold for ourpatients the potentialities within.

NOTE

1. Revised version of a paper presented at the monthly meeting of the Michigan Psychoana-lytic Council, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 16, 1997. The author wishes to acknowl-edge, with gratitude, Kathleen Koepele, Edward Gibeau, James Grotstein, and an unknownreviewer for their thoughtful readings of, and comments on, earlier versions of this paper.

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