Nothingness, meaninglessnes, chaos, and the "black hole" revisited

In the present article some clinical material involving complaints of nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, and the "black hole" is presented and discussed. The purpose of the discussion is to illustrate that it is not possible to interpret this material solely as representing the reemergence of psychosis or early infantile catastrophic states. It is necessary to analyze this material, along with all other material, on at least five channels of therapeutic listening that I have described in previous work on the subject. These channels are the traditional Freudian, the Kleinian, self psychology, the phenomenological, and the interactional channels of listening. They are based on utterly incompatible premises. In this article I reviewed them briefly and then tried to illustrate how they may be applied to the same clinical material. One hopes that it has been demonstrated that the emergence of this characteristic nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, void, and black hole material should not be automatically attributed to any one underlying intrapsychic situation, but can have many meanings in one patient as well as a variety of different meanings in different patients. Because this material is so dramatic when it emerges and is relatively common in the patients we see in our clinical work today, it is very important not to be misled by preconceived notions of what it means; one might even argue that the insistence on certain preconceived interpretations of given material represents an unfortunate form of countertransference.