Having A Life

1 The Case of Margaret Little

"My real problems were matters of existence and identity: I did not know what 'myself' was."

—MARGARET LITTLE

THE WORDS OF THE ARTIST AND PSYCHOANALYST MARGARET LITTLE CONvey a problematic uncertainty to her sense of existence and a difficulty sustaining a subjective position in the world that is echoed by many patients—the complaint of "not having a life." Little (1985) described what Kohut would later call a pathology of the self, a self for whom, in her terms, "anxieties concerning existence, survival, or identity" (p. 15) predominate. Little's first analyst in the late 1930s had observed that she seemed to doubt her own right to existence. Modell was to address this issue in a groundbreaking paper of 1965, ...