“…Adhesive attachments to various phenomena in the transitional realm have thus been conceptualized as attempts to organize object relational–libidinal investments that may serve to sustain or re-create a reassuring presence, the “illusion of mother” (Burland, 1986; Tolpin, 1971), in the management of traumatic early experience (Rangell, 1991). Steiner’s (1993) conceptualization of “psychic retreats,” sadistic yet paradoxically comforting internal fantasies of self and object interactions that also serve to bolster defects in intrapsychic structure (Bak, 1953; Searles, 1963), the frozen states of transitional relatedness as described by Searles (1963) and Modell (1988), and cycles of repetitive enactments in the clinical setting (Boesky, 1982; Ellman & Moskowitz, 1998; Renik, 1992), may represent similar conceptualizations of the patient’s attempts to work through early trauma in the transitional realm (Freud, 1914/1961d; Limentani, 1989).…”