| Abstract: | There are some melancholic patients who come to us whose internal object world is dim, depleted, and impoverished. Their objects fail to take hold from the start, and this failure of internalization contributes to major deficits in the self and results in the inability to move from an identification with a dead internal object to object usage, where externality and intersubjectivity are born and the ability to claim a right to a life is created. In this paper, the author presents a clinical example that illustrates how it’s possible to create new internal objects and states of aliveness so the patient is able to claim a “right to life,” where hope in human relatedness is restored, along with the capacity to mourn. |
