The self in transformation: the passage from a two- to a three-dimensional internal world

This paper seeks to describe some of the steps in the process of transformation from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional inner world as experienced by a patient who had essentially used up her remaining vital resources. An important hurdle had first to be crossed when the analyst was required to demonstrate her capacity to survive with her in a two-dimensional claustrum, in a solitary confinement. Here, an oppositional defensive system had been created in which positive and negative personifications of vital but withdrawn energies ensured that she was locked within an interior world that sought to bar entry to anyone else, and where the possibility of the transformation of her self was disallowed. The patient had to accept the risk of breaching the system of self-defence before the analyst was allowed a mutual position within her interior world. A series of dreams tracks this transformation internally and in relation to the analyst.