The theme of emptiness had been most salient for me in my work with women (Charles, 1999), for whom reciprocal experiences of internal empti- ness and external void are often highly charged, evoking images of creation and birth. These themes are particularly at issue for women who have not felt 'carried to term' by their own mothers, and search, often with little hope, for ways in which to feel 'held' within the object world. In my work with women, images of emptiness have been evocative of the contours of my own physiology; the consulting room becomes the womb within which the self might be newly delineated in this precarious cocoon of care set within the larger, and often terrifying, void.
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