Misrecognitions and the fear of not knowing

A form of pathological internal object relationship is described that timelessly perpetuates the infant's subjective experience of the mother's difficulty in recognizing and responding to her infant's internal state. The individual identifies with both the mother and the infant in this internal object relationship and experiences intense anxiety and despair in relation to his efforts at knowing what he is feeling and therefore of knowing who he is. Substitute formations are utilized to create the illusion that the individual knows what he feels.