Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer: The Tragedy of Triumph 9780429436611, 9780429791499, 9781138348554

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“This marvellous document so generously and openly brought to us by Dr Sousa Monteiro enables us to witness . . . the path travelled by Meltzer in his practice and in his clinical and theoretical research, a process of ongoing inquiry and revision that lasted his entire life. Basic problems in his claustrum theory, especially within the realm of perversion as seen in the light of this theory, are discussed and illustrated here with a degree of detail and depth I have not seen before in his known work. This book enabled me to witness Dr Sousa Monteiro’s work as well as the work of a great teacher. I would like to congratulate him for writing such a historic clinical document, and for his dedication and love, which is not the proper word for an analyst. The passion for his analytic work led Dr Sousa Monteiro to establish a close relationship with Meltzer and to write this unique document. With gratitude and affection.” —Yolanda Gampel, PhD, Professor Dr in Advanced Psychotherapy, Sackler Medical School, Tel-Aviv University, Israel; training, supervising and past president of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; vice-president of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis (2001–2005); representative for Europe in the board of the IPA (2007–2011); recipient, Hayman International Prize and the Mary S. Sigourney Award, 2006

“This unusual, even unique volume, is likely to become essential reading for students of Donald Meltzer, and those interested in the creativity necessary for the psychoanalytic treatment of severe disturbance. The author provides a detailed insight into the way Meltzer approached his clinical work. One has the feeling of being in the room with them both. There are countless examples of Meltzer the clinical thinker; one of many struck me – ‘One can be very meticulous about technique but if you do that you may behave in an inflexible and unkind way. My own preference is that kindness should take precedence over technical rigidity.’ . . . Irrespective of one’s clinical orientation, a wealth of insights awaits the reader.” —Dr Paul Williams, PhD, training and supervising analyst, British Psychoanalytic Society, Joint Editor-in-Chief, IJP 2001–2007

“This is a historic book. It is so genuine and creative in all its aspects that it certainly has to be published and spread widely for every analyst to have the opportunity to savor it. It is also a work of beauty . . . This is a book of art. The reader will see Meltzer distilling Kleinian, Bionian and Meltzerian concepts naturally blossoming out of the material displayed. One will also find original concepts that for whatever reason did not make it into formal books or articles by Meltzer. Sousa Monteiro finds an original way of making a book that has the reports of thirteen years of analytic sessions, thirteen years of clinical supervisions

with Meltzer and many more years of the experience of Meltzer stimulated by the patient and the analyst at work. For colleagues who have not known him it will be a discovery that might blow them away, as I first was when finding Donald.” —Dr Robert Olsener, MD, training and supervising analyst, Seattle Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Centre of California; teacher, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, USA and Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Germany

“This is an excellent book . . . The detailed, verbatim account of this long supervision with Donald Meltzer brings his voice back to those of us who knew him and reminds us of what we have lost. The author does this in a remarkably sensitive and vivid way. I can’t think of any document of a supervision quite like it in the psychoanalytic literature.” —Dr Robert Caper, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry; Training and supervising analyst, Member of Melanie Klein Trust

“This book is about passion, truth and kindness. Passion, truth and kindness are present in the relationship between Meltzer and Sousa Monteiro in those twelve years of supervision with one of the most creative, generous and intuitive psychoanalysts in the last years of his life . . . Much more than a book about a very special supervision, this is an act of love, a tribute to psychoanalysis and to Donald Meltzer. It is very difficult to find words to describe the feeling of thankfulness that overflows from the pages of this captivating book. But I am sure that each new reader will recognize this feeling in his own mind. Thank you very much Donald Meltzer and João Sousa Monteiro.” —Renato Trachtenberg, MD, training and supervising analyst, Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Porto Alegre; full Member, Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Studies Centre of Porto Alegre

“The author brings very generously his long experience supervising with Donald Meltzer . . . he shares with us the wonderful clinical wisdom of Donald Meltzer . . . We can ‘see’, reading this book, an analyst working and, through the supervision, Meltzer’s very rich and clinical conception of psychoanalysis. One comes away from it with a ‘binocular’ vision and a deep appreciation for the author’s generosity.” —Lia Pistiner de Cortinas, PhD, training and supervising analyst, Argentine Psychoanalytic Association; Professor, post-graduate psychology, University of Buenos Aires

“The author presents us with a rare opportunity to hear Meltzer work in supervision with an analysis over several years. From the very beginning, Meltzer delves into emotional depths, captivating the reader in suspense and fascination. Meltzer’s faith in the analytic process and in the unconscious workings of the mind is compelling. Many of his theoretical concepts . . . come alive in a vivid and clinically useful style. João Sousa Monteiro’s sensitivity, analytic depth and openness make this journey through an analysis a profoundly moving experience. We are all enriched by his venture.” —Avner Bergstein, training and supervising analyst, Israel Psychoanalysis Society

“The creativity and clinical acumen of Donald Meltzer have attained almost legendary status . . . This volume reveals Meltzer’s profound and imaginative clinical thinking . . . As such, it should be of great interest and value to analysts of all schools. [Readers] will come away with a vivid experience of what it must have been like to work with Meltzer and their thinking and practice will be enriched by his many suggestions and propositions.” —Howard Levine, MD, training and supervising analyst, Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis, founding member, Group for the Study of Psychoanalytic Processes and the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies; North America representative, IPA Board

“Meltzer was one of the most creative of the Kleinians and to work this long and close with such a creative spirit is a real gift. A good deal of the wisdom that grew in a long life of psychic exploration is transmitted to us, channelled and amplified by Mr. Monteiro . . . Monteiro masterfully and tenderly guides us through labyrinths that close over us, finding paths and openings that make it more than worthwhile.” —Michael Eigen, PhD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University (adjunct); Senior Member, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis; former editor, The Psychoanalytic Review; author of twenty-six books

“This extraordinary text has all the attributes to become a didactic textbook for colleagues to get acquainted with the detailed unedited inside story of a psychoanalytic treatment. And should be an encouragement for others to follow the example of this new genre in psychoanalytic writing, one that is borne out of conviction, endurance, commitment, integrity and, as mentioned above, a love for

psychoanalysis and a devoted respect for an outstanding teacher. It is a privilege to be a witness of this masterclass in the technical management of a borderline claustrum dweller and the observation of the countertransference experience of being buffeted by a tyrannical reluctant and compulsive part of the patient.” —Alberto Hahn, MD, full Member, British Psychoanalytic Society

LONG-TERM PSYCHOANALYTIC SUPERVISION WITH DONALD MELTZER

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer is a detailed account of a particularly demanding analysis which Donald Meltzer closely supervised over twelve years. This will enable the reader to closely follow the internal life of a long-term, trying analysis. The reader can see how Meltzer’s thoughts had crucially guided the course of this analysis in many of its most challenging moments, often redirecting it. By watching things happening, the reader is enabled to get a deeper insight into Meltzer’s highly complex, though outstanding thought. On many particularly important points, the author invited Meltzer to give his thoughts and interpretations in his own words as if he himself was the analyst. This provides the reader with a unique opportunity to ‘listen’ to Meltzer verbatim. Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer demonstrates the often overwhelming yet fascinating complexities of mental life and will speak to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as those interested in the philosophy of the mind. João Sousa Monteiro is psychoanalyst in private practice, in Lisbon, Portugal. He worked in supervision with Donald Meltzer monthly for thirteen years. Meltzer supervised all his clinical cases during this period.

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LONG-TERM PSYCHOANALYTIC SUPERVISION WITH DONALD MELTZER The Tragedy of Triumph

João Sousa Monteiro

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 João Sousa Monteiro The right of João Sousa Monteiro to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Monteiro, João Sousa, author. Title: Long-term psychoanalytic supervision with Donald Meltzer : the tragedy of triumph / João Sousa Monteiro. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030340 (print) | LCCN 2018032725 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429436611 (Master) | ISBN 9780429791499 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780429791482 (ePub) | ISBN 9780429791475 (Mobipocket/Kindle) | ISBN 9781138348554 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138348585 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis—Case studies. | Psychotherapist and patient. | Psychotherapists—Supervision of. | Meltzer, Donald. Classification: LCC RC509.8 (ebook) | LCC RC509.8 .M66 2019 (print) | DDC 616.89/17—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030340 ISBN: 978-1-138-34855-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-34858-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43661-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

To Carmo

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“We’re very helpless . . . that’s how we help our patients, by being helpless . . . (long, thoughtful smile) . . . it’s extraordinary . . .” Donald Meltzer (Chapter 13)

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CONTENTS

Presentation of the book Acknowledgements Preface by Michael Eigen Introduction by Alberto Hahn 1

2

3

4

5

6

“. . . for a patient to discover this atmosphere of passionate interest in his mental life is the real therapeutic factor in analysis, I think.”

xvii xviii xix xxi

1

Experiencing the session in the transference versus experiencing it outside the transference: the difference between analysis and psychotherapy

15

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst though also as actings in the transference

27

“If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past.”

41

“When she lowers the passion, she lowers the value of everything, and then abandonment is so much easier”

53

The importance of the concept of forgiveness as a key factor in “creating a new way of thinking about things”

70

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Contents

7 “. . . it has to be made in the depths . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . .”

82

8 “It’s not the badness that has made the secrecy; it’s the secrecy that has made the badness”

95

9 “JSM: Do you take notes of the sessions you think are important? DM: Oh no, I take notes on every session. JSM: On every session of every patient? DM: On every session of every patient. JSM: And you see fourteen patients a day . . .”

113

10 “I can’t come [to the session], I feel it . . . I’m a piece of shit . . . I’ll come as soon as I feel human . . .”

123

11 The fecal nature of the devil

130

12 “. . . worrying about your patient is terribly important . . . the only way we have of keeping the patients safe is to be worried about them.”

138

13 “Well, it’s like introducing the left breast to the right breast . . .”

149

14 “. . . I have to come here to know what I’ll do the next hour . . .”

158

15 Wrestling with triumph

171

16 “. . . the way in which she does it is by crawling inside everybody and controlling them from inside”

189

17 Mother’s inside transformed into a golden grave for the triumphant child

200

18 “. . . all her actions have to be listened to as if they were dreams . . .”

213

19 Projective identification into the internal mother may infuse into the subject’s hemorrhoids such an intensely coloured pathological life

221

Contents xv

20 An acting in the counter-transference re-enacted in the course of a supervision session

226

21 “The thing about life in the claustrum is that it is cut off from the beauty of the world”

244

Appendix: Donald Meltzer’s claustrum theory – a brief survey References Index

260 263 265

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PRESENTATION OF THE BOOK

It was a treasure to work with Donald Meltzer in supervision for thirteen years. I saw him in Oxford for two hours every month for the first nine years and then twice monthly for two hours for the following four years. He closely supervised all my clinical cases during those years. The supervision sessions were taped as well as all his clinical seminars that I was fortunate to attend. This book is an account of the supervision sessions of a particularly demanding analysis that Meltzer closely supervised for twelve years. I believe that this book will allow the reader to closely follow how Meltzer’s thoughts were crucial in guiding and often redirecting much of the course of this analysis in many key points, often redirecting it. By watching this happening, the reader is hopefully enabled to get a deeper insight into many of Meltzer’s fundamental clinical, theoretical and technical views. The editing of the clinical material was guided by the aim of bringing to the pages of this book the truth of the clinical material, of Meltzer’s thoughts and words, as well as the immediacy and the intensity of the atmosphere of the supervision sessions as I did experience them. There is quite a number of Meltzer’s thoughts on both clinical and theoretical issues which I cannot recall having as yet seen in his published pages. In many particularly important points of the material, Meltzer worded his views and interpretations in his own precisely chosen words. This way of putting many particularly complex thoughts and views into his own precise words may perhaps allow the reader to often “listen” to Meltzer verbatim. In these many points, Meltzer would therefore offer an unequivocal translation of his thinking.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Prof Michael Eigen, Dr Alberto Hahn, Prof Dr Yolanda Gampel, Dr Robert Oelsner, Dr Paul Williams, Dr Robert Trachtenberg, Dr Robert Caper, Prof Lia Pistiner, Dr Howard Levine, and Avner Bergstein for the time and the keen and warm interest that they have so generously given to the manuscript of this book. I am also grateful to Prof Eigen, Dr Oelsner and particularly to Dr Hahn for the fascinating correspondence I was privileged to exchange with them about this manuscript. Now, I hope I will continue learning from the many feelings and thoughts that their kind words have evoked in me. I am particularly indebted to Dr Nuno Sousa Monteiro for having carefully transcribed each line of Meltzer’s – this, however, being the least of his contributions to this book. For as he went all the way through the many tapes, I was privileged to discuss with him countless concrete points in the sessions speaking so tellingly of so many fascinating sides of Meltzer’s gifts, both humane and scientific, showing them pulsating in the sessions. This proved a constant source of enjoyment and discovery for me. I am deeply grateful to Sophie for the privilege of working with her this long. I profoundly admire the depth and strength of her passionate attachment to the beauty of the world and her unbending courage to pursue the direction of her passion. I am also very grateful for her courage and her generosity for twice giving me her full permission to make whatever scientific use I might think best for all the clinical material of her analysis. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to Donald Meltzer. His endless passion and awe for the enigmas crowding mental life, the depth of his love for the truth, his sense of dignity and of respect, as well as his boundless generosity, will always stay with me as a guiding light. Working in supervision this long and close with such a uniquely gifted and inspired analyst was an unforgettable illuminating experience.

PREFACE

It is an honor to write a preface for the pages of the book you are about to read, a book with a real and expressive face indeed. João Sousa Monteiro delineates in detail a twelve-year supervision of a case with Donald Meltzer in the last years of Meltzer’s life. Meltzer was one of the most creative of the Kleinians and to work this long and close with such a creative spirit is a real gift. A good deal of the wisdom that grew in a long life of psychic exploration is transmitted to us, channelled and amplified by Mr Monteiro. Monteiro worked with his patient, here called Sophie, for twenty-six years, mostly after Meltzer could no longer continue, the year of his death. Monteiro transcribed his sessions with Meltzer, so we are treated to a first-hand view of Meltzer’s personal language hot off the psyche. We are brought close to inner processes dealing with life and death, fear and love of beauty, attacks of internal objects and attempts to alter the insides of the internal mother. In an attempt to destroy what is inside the internal mother, one may destroy what is good within oneself. Freud hinted that this internal struggle is not something that may be decisively won forever, but small shifts in the battalions of death and life, adding to the side of life, can make a big difference for a person. We are taken through a depth journey in which the false triumph of sealing oneself off from life gives way to creativity of lived experience – a journey, in one way or another, many share. Difficulties are not minimized, yet seeds of affirmation come through. When I met Meltzer we spoke of a generative internal couple that can be subject to appreciation and/or attack. We attack our own generative tendencies projected into a couple within us. The struggle between generative tendencies, barriers and self-attack has immense consequences. Our psychic being may be pregnant all life long, often aborting, giving birth to monsters, deformity, but also the breath of life, beauty and love. Monteiro masterfully and tenderly guides us through labyrinths that close over us, finding paths and openings that make it

xx

Preface

more than worthwhile. His contact with Meltzer and work with Sophie adds to the density, richness and light of his own capacity as a guide for us. Michael Eigen New York City, March, 2017 Prof Michael Eigen, PhD, has been training and supervising analyst at the New

York Psychoanalytic Institute for many years, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis, and past-Director of the Postdoctoral Program of Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the New York University. He has run a Seminar on Lacan, Winnicott and Bion for over 40 years. He has authored 23 books and is Emeritus Editor of the Psychoanalytic Review.

INTRODUCTION

The fascinating conversation in this comprehensive book invites us to observe and follow the development of a psychoanalytic process as a landscape that encompasses the affects and pregenital strivings in a borderline patient who resides in the claustrum, the keen interest of the analyst in his attempt to understand and contain the acting in and out impulses of his patient while retaining the analytic attitude and a supervisor who modulates the emotional temperature of the reported sessions by encouraging a certain interpretative line or at times discouraging some illconceived formulation replacing it with a more focused reading of the unconscious phantasy of the patient’s internal world. The result is a kaleidoscopic display that is at times painful – when we identify with the patient’s helplessness; admirable – when we empathise with the analyst’s tolerant and reliable commitment to his work and his pursuit of the truth of his patient’s predicament, and awe inspiring – when we are engaged in the observation of Donald Meltzer’s thinking in a case that is not only difficult to come to terms with clinically, but creates problems in the conceptualization of the symbols used by this patient who functions almost exclusively in a part object world. The language used is always specific in addressing internal object relations and when dealing with external issues such as the use or abuse of the analytic setting and its consequences in the counter-transference. Much of the content of the clinical material comprises dreams and we get a clear picture of the analyst’s way of thinking about their meaning in terms of the transference situation as a reflection of the patient’s internal world in the context of the patient’s waking life, her behaviour and day dreams. His honest account of this process is thorough and clear. The patient’s material and the analyst’s interpretations are part of an on-going dialogue with an emphasis on trying to maintain an analytic attitude by being alert to the dislocations that make the patient depart from the constraints of the dependence in the transference situation. And it is here

xxii Introduction

that we also see the remedial situation that the supervisory function introduces into this process. As this case requires a particular state of alertness regarding the level of the work and the attunement of the analyst to the patient’s communications, her tendency to act out and act in the transference makes it imperative that the transference retains a privileged position as the focus of the interpretations and so we see how this process evolves in the dialogue between analyst and supervisor. Donald Meltzer’s method shows evidence of his firmness and kindness towards his colleague and his “method” of working, underpinning his self-belief when it is required by the understanding of counter-transference issues in the face of the sometimes tyrannical activity of his patient. He also seems to be very alert on the patient’s reaction to extra transference interventions and their confusing and often misleading influence. His dialogue with Sousa Monteiro is cordial and they obviously feel comfortable in each other’s presence. Sometimes one gets the impression of a “pas de deux” when the supervisor follows the analyst’s struggles with his own countertransference. At other times we get the picture of how “reality testing” comes about in the supervisory situation, i.e. the corrective experience between one’s own response to the patient’s projective identifications and an alternative viewpoint that may not be contaminated by the infantile sexuality of the patient, say. This perspective is always on offer and patiently made operative as this process evolves, with the insights and the repetitions that are part of the working through the analyst needs to go through on the patient’s behalf. It is a privilege to be a witness of this masterclass in the technical management of a borderline claustrum dweller and the observation of the counter-transference experience of being buffeted by a tyrannical reluctant and compulsive part of the patient. It is clear by now that in this long period of treatment and supervision we are allowed to see the vicissitudes of infantile sexuality in this young woman and the way in which this contaminates to a great extent her adult sexuality, her attitude to intimacy, both at a part and whole object level, her resistance to dependence in the transference while at the same time showing a strong but problematic attachment to her analyst, the defensive strategies used to by-pass situations of loss in the analysis and mourning in her adult life and the nature of her attachment to primary objects which required careful detailed work in the transference. In this context we can follow the way in which Meltzer’s attempts to make adjustments to technical aspects of this analysis advises against excessive interpretative zeal and encourages a) waiting for evidence with the emphasis that prolonged observation generates more credible interpretations for the patient, b) restraining one’s reassurance and optimism and c) not to be too gullible about the patient’s enthusiasm with her morsels of reassuring behaviour that can be an acting out for the benefit of the analyst in the transference. As for the paramount importance of sticking to the observation of the transference, the analyst’s self-awareness of straying sometimes from this brief raises interesting exchanges with his supervisor, who may express empathy, doubt or

Introduction xxiii

warnings such as recommending not to interpret old material as current without the appropriate evidence. This aspect of the work seems to me the most fascinating because it emphasises the fact that the outcome of this work will be less dependent on the degree of disturbance of the patient and mostly hinge on the capacity of the analyst to use his personal resources, his “tools” as provided by his internal objects, to overcome the doubts and periods of hopelessness at times of depressive strife. It does help in this case that this patient also has a parallel positive transference which is recognised and used by the analyst to blend and mitigate some of the more self-destructive activities he is unconsciously asked to partake in. And it is this analytic capability that allows the patient to be chaperoned occasionally towards a depressive position vis-à-vis her objects – a state which she sometimes embraces, albeit reluctantly – but which she can use as stepping stones for self-containment and further development. The Tragedy of Triumph is a labor of love, not only for psychoanalysis but also a tribute to Donald Meltzer, a gifted, generous, intuitive psychoanalyst, one of the most original thinkers of his generation and a much loved teacher. This extraordinary text has all the attributes to become a didactic textbook for colleagues to get acquainted with the detailed unedited inside story of a psychoanalytic treatment. And should be an encouragement for others to follow the example of this new genre in psychoanalytic writing, one that is borne out of conviction, endurance, commitment, integrity and, as mentioned above, a love for psychoanalysis and a devoted respect for an outstanding teacher. Alberto Hahn London, 3rd. September 2017

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CHAPTER 1 “. . . for a patient to discover this atmosphere of passionate interest in his mental life is the real therapeutic factor in analysis, I think.”

Summary Donald Meltzer coined the term and first worked out the concept of “the gathering of the transference” (cf. 1967). The concept brings together into a clinically workable form the complex sequence of processes which are loosely alluded to as the development of the transference, or even more vaguely described as the initial phase of the transference. To my best recollection Meltzer was first to show that the gathering of the transference is a long, highly complex and sensitive process, being crucial in giving every analysis a firm basis. Concrete clinical evidence arguing this understanding is discussed in this as well as in the next few chapters. The gathering of the transference is however thought to immediately trigger off emotional turbulence which most often takes the form of actings both in and out the transference. This chapter describes, almost graphically, a number of unusually intense responses to the gathering of the transference. The history of the evolution of the transference is argued to be more clearly inscribed in the evolution of “dream-life,” rather than in individual dreams (cf. Meltzer, 1984). NB: This chapter covers the first year of the analysis of Sophie.

JSM: Sophie is the fourth child of highly educated foreign parents. Only Sophie was born in Portugal. Since she was four Sophie was noted to always be the brightest in her class, though already showing recurrent problems with indiscipline. At such an early age she seemed driven to break as many rules as she could.

2

A passionate interest in mental life

Sophie graduated with the highest marks of her course, having immediately been invited abroad for a PhD degree. Shortly after having received her new degree Sophie went to another place which soon became known in her analysis as “the Crazy Place” and where she lived for the next two years. A year after she had been living there, her former tutor unexpectedly joined her. From one day to the next Sophie married him and had a daughter with him. As soon as she married, however, she began suffering from what she described as “nightmares,” as well as from frequent intestinal colic which often resulted in diarrhea. In time, her intestinal condition proved to have a rather upsetting outcome. For Sophie has gradually been restricting, below all medically advisable limits, both the amount and range of food she was able to trust as not causing her further colic. She had gone through any number of medical examinations for her unyielding intestinal condition which however proved surprisingly negative. As her intestinal upset persisted, however, she managed to persuade a surgeon friend of hers practicing in a faraway country who, against all previous medical advice, performed on her a tentative cholecystectomy. The surgery, however, had not only not brought her any relief from her condition but was even said to have aggravated it. It was, however, the increasingly unbearable grip of nightmares and her upsetting state of chronic exhaustion that mostly decided Sophie to seek treatment. Sophie has been seen by eight psychiatrists and analysts during the following ten years. She however has been unable to recognize any palpable benefit from this rather odd therapeutic journey, and, on the edge of exhaustion, she decided to give analysis a last try. When I first saw Sophie she really looked on the verge of both physical and psychical collapse. I began to see her in analysis three times weekly. Sophie lives in a constant, deep resentment of her family. She feels that she had been deprived of something precious she cannot however describe, and seems to put all her efforts into retrieving this loss. She blames her family for having never cared about her, never listened to her, never respected her. Soon, however, the core of her resentment seemed to be her father. “Even today I follow him everywhere, like Konrad Lorenz’s little ducks, fighting to have a bit of his rare attention.” Sophie cannot stand her mother’s voice, particularly in the evening. Should she hear her voice, even if only over the telephone and for not much more than a minute or two, she was sure she was again going to have nightmares that night, and breaks out in yet another fury against her mother. “I have to protect myself with great care at nighttime, trying not to be invaded again by too many nightmares during the night,” she told me already in our first meeting. Every time she visits her parents – which often happened – she goes in already arguing quite aggressively with them or indeed with anyone whomever she might find there. She just argues for no matter what trifle as if always fiercely disputing the unnamed precious object of her unbearable loss. Surprisingly, however, both her mother and father

A passionate interest in mental life 3

were consistently described as being particularly fond of her and even lovingly devoted to both her and her daughter. Whenever any of Sophie’s women friends wished to meet her father, she would drastically dispute whom she is going to allow to meet him and under what precise circumstances of both place and time. She would get mad and burst out in a fury at anyone who might dare to make the slightest critical remark about her daughter. The space of her relationship with her daughter was threateningly described as “sacred,” as she repeatedly put it, meaning that no one should ever dare to step in except to praise her. On the other hand, she can’t forgive herself if she neglects any possible detail concerning her daughter. Should her daughter express the slightest wish, she has to immediately satisfy it, no matter how difficult. Sophie feels under the compulsion of forestalling her daughter’s desires and satisfying them even before they were formulated. And yet, Sophie has always been very firm in describing herself as a very happy and joyful child. And indeed, she does appear to be endowed with an inexhaustible vitality and capacity for joy. Her joy and humor seemed infectious, and it seemed quite easy for her to make both friends and lovers everywhere she shows up – with whom, afterward, she would equally easily quarrel often severely. As a young girl she could never stop running and jumping, and became noted for the extraordinary things she used to do in her physical activities. In the beginning of her analysis, every adult, particularly the husbands of her women friends who in one way or another was concerned with children was, in her eyes, definitely “a beast.” During the first two to three months of analysis Sophie took up the time of her sessions with what she called “nightmares,” as well as her resentful accusations against her family. Her nightmares were all about her being betrayed, abandoned and persecuted. Most of them were however imparted in the form of headings and scraps of narratives. There were virtually no associations except those many conveyed by the music of her voice by which she usually made clear her urgency to get rid of her rather intense feelings of persecution thrown out into me in the form of “nightmares.” I therefore tended to tentatively read the substance of her nightmares in the music of her voice rather than in the unintelligible scraps of her narratives. I nevertheless always tried not to allow a single nightmare to leave us without it being talked over to some extent. I always quietly questioned her about the sense of this or that aspect of each one even if, in the end, I was usually unable to gather any sense of it, such was her acute need not to dwell on them but really to get rid of them . . . DM: . . . which really are all masochistic phantasies; masochistic masturbatory phantasies, I think. JSM: After this initial period of two to three months, however, she brought a dream – no longer a “nightmare,” but what appeared to me a real dream; the first dream of her analysis, I would say. She dreamed that she was talking to a nice,

4

A passionate interest in mental life

tender childcare officer whom she had actually known many years before. In her dream, Sophie was putting the following question to her: “Is it better to have a happy childhood and an unhappy adult life, or an unhappy childhood and a happy adult life?” DM: So she begins to differentiate between a child and an adult, corresponding really to the split between her dream life, which is largely taken up as a childish masturbatory masochistic phantasy life, and her life outside, in which there are lots of adult aspects, already taking steps toward transference. But her infantile sexual life seems to be largely confined to what she calls nightmares. Now, there is a nice childcare officer, which of course is a bit of transference for you, offering you a choice, really: you can either relate yourself as a nice childcare officer to her as an adult, or you can relate yourself as somebody who presents himself as a nice childcare officer but really abuses children – which one do you want? She offers you a choice. JSM: Although I asked her about this nice, tender woman, all she was able to provide me with was recalling how nice she was. She did it, however, in a very tender voice as if she was “dreaming” her remembrances of her right there, on the couch. The change of the music of her voice toward tenderness was striking. I suggested to her that she seemed to put some hope in finding out, through her analysis, what had really been unhappy in her “happy childhood,” which had perhaps been concealed behind her hectic activity and wit. “You seem to hint that the unhappy side of your happy childhood is what has now been damaging your adult life. And that, by closely and quietly looking into it together with the nice child care officer, in your analysis, you may perhaps find the truth about your childhood, and one day envisage becoming a reasonably happy adult, and of course see the end of both your nightmares and intestinal colic.” DM: We have evidence of her offering you either maternal or paternal transference, but also of offering you contact with her masculinity or her femininity. We begin to get a picture both of bisexuality and the division between adult and infantile, between external and internal. And now we shall see what happens. It looks as if it is going to build up into a massive acting in the transference. JSM: A pronounced change in her dream life now began to emerge. She really begins to bring dreams, instead of “nightmares.” Besides, instead of presenting herself in the role of the betrayed, abandoned and persecuted one in the few “nightmares” she still brought to her sessions, she is now shown in the opposite role of the betrayer, the persecutor, and the one who really does harm to others. In a paradigmatic dream of this period, she saw her ex-husband’s present wife, Florence, in her parents’ bedroom, burst into a fury against her, throwing her out of the room. Then she saw herself in her parents’ sitting-room lecturing

A passionate interest in mental life 5

on children to a number of her women friends who have divorced, telling everyone what they should do about their children. This would soon begin to swell into a major trend in her personality: to tell others what they should say, do and even think. DM: She is giving you plenty of warning of what’s going to happen when she really begins to act it in the transference. JSM: You will soon see how far your guess goes . . . DM: She is getting ready to take control of your life, both as an analytic mother and as a lover-father. She is really going to invade you. This is a very hysterical transference – a very concrete infantile invasion of the Oedipal couple to separate them and to relate to both of them in an erotic way, controlling, domineering and sadistically possessive. Besides, she has thrown mummy out and replaced her as an expert on children. She is really giving you plenty of warning of what is going to happen when she really begins to act it all in the transference. JSM: Together with this change in her dreams there also occurred a change in the matters she began to bring to her sessions. She told me that every time she had lunch or dinner with her parents, particularly if some of her siblings are also there, if her father was not present, she would simply prevent anyone from sitting at his place at the top end of the table, by herself taking his place. If, however, the father was present, she occupied her mother’s traditional chair, at her father’s right-hand side. She fights so forcefully for these “magical” seats that no one dares any more to oppose her for they would immediately find themselves embroiled in a fight. She also described how she had come to totally control her ex-husband’s mother’s house in every detail, thus taking over her role in all these tasks, to the point of deciding what should be inside the cupboards in the kitchen, and so on. During this period of her analysis a severe quarrel burst out within her family, shaking its social image of unblemished dignity and power, so carefully built up for many years. It also put her untouchable father in a weak position. Sophie exulted. Not only would she now take on power over the whole family, relishing in humiliating them all, but she would most of all bend her father down on his knees, as she herself put it, exulting at his surprisingly revealed weakness. As she told me this, she suddenly jumped up on her feet, pressing her back against the wall, right in front of me, flashing me a rather crazy look, almost shouting in a hardly restrained scream of triumph: “Now I’ve got him!!” Her shout of triumph really impressed me and vividly flashed into my mind Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes as well as David with the Head of Goliath. Then she began to build up a carefully planned strategy aiming at dominating everyone in the family, but particularly her father. Part of her plan was a lunch she was intending to have in private with her powerful father during which – “after putting him to the wall, I-will-tell-him-what-to-do!!”

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A passionate interest in mental life

Several of her symptoms continued by now to show a clear transformation. Her “nightmares” rarely emerged and she certainly could experience what appeared to be many moments of joy and relief. During all these months I did not hear any more of her intestinal colic. As we approached the first holidays, however, she was suddenly invaded by nightmares and by feelings of being abandoned and betrayed. In a dream of this period she saw herself driving a car. Her father was sitting at her side, and her mother and myself were both on the back seat. She became very anxious because every time she needed to see the road at her right side her father was always there obstructing her vision. DM: With a dream like that, it’s becoming more obvious that while she is talking about her father, her father, her father, it’s really you, and her mother sitting behind her, becoming the focus of her infantile feelings, thus showing the transference beginning to gather. All this talk about wrecking her family and exploding them, it’s just a lot of talk, really. It’s gradually coming into the transference, and when it comes into the transference you will have some fireworks (smiling). Let us see what happens. It’s very interesting. JSM: She also dreamed that, during a session, while she was lying on the couch, her mother and me were both at the end of the consulting room looking into a large wardrobe that is really there. In her dream, her mother and myself were both whispering something to each other which she could not hear. She also could not see what we were doing because we were just behind her. Then, during her dream, she got a terrible pain in her teeth and all her teeth suddenly fell out. She desperately needed help but, she said, “You didn’t care the least what was happening to me!” – and woke up in anxiety. DM: Here you have a dream representing the baby defecating, soiling itself, enraged at the parents turning their backs on her. Let’s see . . . how far along in the analysis are we now? Is this all the first year? JSM: It’s seven months now. DM: You see, symptoms are getting better because it is all coming into the transference. But it hasn’t exploded in the transference yet. JSM: At the end of a session an unusually violent thunderstorm burst out. She left my consulting room but a minute afterward she rang at my door again saying that she was terrified of the storm, and asking me to let her make a telephone call. So I opened the outside door of the building to her and she came up in the lift back into my consulting room to make the telephone call. However, I hadn’t realized that the plug in my consulting room did not work. So after a rather complicated number of steps attempting to find her a proper plug, though without allowing

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her into any other space in my apartment, I unfortunately had to tell her that I could not help her with it. DM: One can be very meticulous about technique but if you do that you may behave in an inflexible and unkind way. My own preference is that kindness should take precedence over technical rigidity.1 JSM: Next session she reported a dream in which she was watching, impotently, a car with her father, her mother and her daughter, just drowning in the sea. She again described this dream as a terrible nightmare. I was, however, surprised because the music of her voice did not convey any anxiety one would expect to hear from such an imminent tragedy. During the first sessions after holidays she first didn’t say a word about nightmares. And yet, she told me that she now has two lovers at the same time and was worried because of her own boundless wit and imagination regarding what she called “all the unthinkable things” she used to do at school and later at university. She was very amused about all these “unthinkable things.” She described one of these lovers as “a David Lynch-like lover,” that is, a dedicated sado-masochistic lover. In another session she surprised me by alluding to both her good and bad mother, saying: “This is childish but that’s the way it is: my mother has things that I like and things that I hate at the same time.” I do not recall having ever mentioned these terms to her. In still another session she told me that she refused, for the first time ever, an invitation from her father to have lunch alone with her. DM: Her dream of her drowning her family undoubtedly did not contain the anguish that such an event would in fact involve, as you said. What she calls “nightmares” describe emotional situations in which the representation is hidden and transformed into persecutions and tragedies and so on, primarily by her sadomasochism. JSM: I thought that her dream was a re-experience of the thunderstorm of the last session while she was actually desiring to get rid of her mother, her father and her daughter in one go to keep herself inside my place with me . . . DM: . . . yes, they now are all fading away in their infantile significance, being replaced by you and your ambience as the objects of her infantile erotism and wishes to control you through her intrusiveness, represented by this intrusion into your place under the pretext of needing to make a phone call. And of course the first time it happens you are polite with her, but after that it’s probably important to forestall its happening again and again by analyzing, very carefully, the consequences of it in both her dreams and the material of the next sessions. And the first consequence seems to me to be that in another transference move she now

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A passionate interest in mental life

drowns her father, her mother, her daughter; they are losing their importance as the figures of her masochistic phantasy. JSM: . . . fed on by my having allowed her inside my apartment? DM: Yes. JSM: This also being why she now refuses to have lunch with her father, I think. DM: Yes. And I would warn her – this is very important – that in her phantasy she is tremendously intrusive, getting into father’s place, getting into mother’s place, and so on, and that she must be careful about her impulses to enact it with you by intruding into the space of other people, other patients, or your family, in your life . . . JSM: . . . as when she managed to take full control of even the cupboards of her ex-husband’s mother’s household; and in the dreams in which she lectured everyone? DM: Yes; it’s important to try to be very careful to stick to the schedule of the sessions and to the times of sessions; you have to forestall any repetition of this acting out, but the first time you were caught off guard and you just behaved in a gentlemanly way. But be careful to prevent it happening again . . . Good! Let’s see what happens because things are really hotting up now. JSM: She reported a dream she had just before the holidays, and which she again described as a nightmare. She dreamed about the person that she imagined to be my wife imagining her as an old woman, and saw herself in both my consulting room and at my house – which indeed has some reality in it since my consulting room is, in fact, in my apartment. Only now did she tell me a dream she had during the holidays. She dreamed that she was at the airport going to Germany, a country she doesn’t know. Her plane was just about to leave when she suddenly realized that not only had she not booked a room to stay that night, but she had no money and no way of getting any. She was very anxious, not knowing what to do. She suddenly saw several members of her family, including her father, who came to the airport to help her out with her predicament and to lend her money. She doesn’t know why, but their help had no effect. She felt desperate and woke up in anxiety. Two sessions after she gave me a different version of the same dream. This time she was furious with the members of her family who were there to help her, both because their presence made her suddenly realize how impotent she was, and also because they actually had the money she needed so much . . . DM: . . . because, you see, they have lost their significance for her. In fact, you might say that they just came and interfered with her phantasy that you would

A passionate interest in mental life 9

show up at the airport, and you would help her, and you would say: “You can stay at my hotel room,” and so on. And here her wretched family come and interfere with her dream, interfere with her masochistic phantasy about how you seduced her, and invaded her, and violated her, and so on . . . “Get out of my dream! You don’t belong here anymore; go drown! I’m dreaming about somebody else now!”, you see. I think that all these are erotic dreams, really. Daddy has no longer a wonderful phallus anymore – you have it. Daddy comes along with his inadequate penis: “Get out! Get out, you don’t have a wonderful phallus anymore!” When you’re dealing with a dream, as far as its significance is concerned, it’s the dream process that you’re dealing with, not the individual dream. You can read the individual dream for itself, of course, but when it comes to analyzing its significance, it’s the “dream life” that’s really going on, not each individual dream (cf. Meltzer, 1984). And that is transference; the movements in the dream life. That’s where the dream was heading. The process that is taking place takes place with all patients. Everybody who comes to analysis has infantile transference relationships all over the place. A little bit here, a little bit there, with their parents, with bosses, with siblings, with friends. Then, gradually, what I called in the Process book “the gathering of the transference” (The Psycho-analytical Process, 1967), you may watch all these transference processes gradually gathering themselves into the analysis, beginning to clarify these other relationships, just as has been happening here. And when it has gathered enough, then you begin to get the acting in the transference, like this telephone call. But you have to be patient about it, it takes time, and this is just the first year . . . I mean, things happen slowly in analysis; it does move forward, but in a spiral way; it covers a lot of distance, but not much progress, and that progress is the very slow evolution of the transference as it goes round, and round, and round . . . JSM: I’m astonished at the extreme difficulty in making really sound progress. DM: There is nothing much you can do to make it go faster. There are lots of things you can do to stop it going, but you can’t make it go faster . . . it won’t go faster. You can make it go round, and round fast, but it will still go slowly forward. It is best if it goes around in a leisurely way, but it will still go forward at the same rate. All these attempts to make analysis quicker, and brief therapy, and so on, they just don’t work, they just bring mutual self-deception. The analyst doesn’t actually do very much; he mainly creates this setting in which the transference can gather through his behavior and his keeping the setting, enabling this transference process to take place; and he assists it a little bit with his interpretations, sometimes. Mostly, he takes an interest in it, and this keeps it moving forward, you see. The fact that someone is interested keeps it moving forward. JSM: I sometimes wonder if I talk too much in the session . . . DM: . . . probably . . .

10 A passionate interest in mental life

JSM: . . . and wonder whether I should perhaps better be silent except when I feel it strictly necessary to intervene. DM: No! If what you have to say is interesting for the patient . . . JSM: . . . I feel it may sometimes be, yes . . . DM: . . . it may in many ways really make the experience of the analysis richer. But if you expect it makes the analysis go faster, you make a mistake. I talk a lot also because I’m very interested and I almost always have something interesting to say, and the patients enjoy it and they get a richer analytic experience, but I have no illusions that I’m making things go faster. My analyses are faster because I make far fewer mistakes now than I used to make. I mean, not only interpretive mistakes, but much less acting in the transference, much more attention paid to the separations and preparing for the separations, therefore much less acting out. You see, acting out, acting in the transference and the analyst’s acting in the counter-transference are the things that really slow up analysis and also make crises and impasses. So, it isn’t true that an analyst can’t become more efficient so that his analyses go along more smoothly and more rapidly. But it’s not because he’s driving them; it’s more because he is not holding them back as much as he used to. JSM: Except in the sense that you have just pointed out above, the analyst’s capacity for creating an atmosphere of real interest for the analysand’s mental life ... DM: . . . oh yes! That’s important. But you see, there is no need to be in a hurry about anything; it really is no use. JSM: What is the average duration of your analyses? DM: Between two and three years. Occasionally under three, and then occasionally six, eight, ten . . . I mean, it depends on the patient. But I would say, on average, neurotic and character disorder patients’ analyses last for between two and three years; I would say half the time that they were, say, 20 years ago, because I do work very efficiently now. JSM: Next session I was impressed with the display of hatred and desire for triumph that seems harbored inside her. She told me how desperately she tries to humiliate her father, to ridicule him every time she meets him in public; how deeply she actually wishes to “cut off his head” (again reminding me of course of Caravaggio’s paintings). And yet, she now begins to realize the extreme arrogance and contempt she has always put in her relationship with her ex-husband, and how she thought of him as real trash, and how desperately she craved not only to

A passionate interest in mental life 11

dominate her family, controlling them, and telling them what they should do in every detail, but even to forcefully instruct them into what they should think. Next day she didn’t come to the session because she had an acute gastroenteritis following another quarrel with her ex-husband. This time, however, she remained at home the whole weekend, alone, thinking of all this, and she decided to write a letter to him, “a white flag,” as she put it. Then she told me: “This could bring a revolution to my life, it could even lead to a revolution in my relationship to my daughter. This could even put an end to my nightmares.” DM: So she immediately acts it out by missing a session. That’s a bit of acting in the transference again. The transference is coming, you see. As they used to say in the old days: “Shorten your sails.” When you see that the gale is coming, you bring your sails down and you make the sails smaller. If it’s going to be a real tornado, you better take all your sails down and just put your head down, and let it blow! (smiling) JSM: So she’s describing to me what presently awaits me, I see . . . She now sounded really upset in confiding to me that she still has an awful image of her mother: “I still can’t get rid of it . . . I still can’t bear her voice and I still have to shut her up. It’s awful . . . it is this awful image that ruins my life, not my nightmares. I can bear the nightmare but no longer this image.” DM: The nightmare-mother, you see. Her objects are split in various ways: there is a good mother and there is a bad mother; there is a good father and there is a bad father; there is a good self and there is a bad self; there is masculine and there is feminine, and so on. She is beginning to get a picture of the complexity of her relationships and beginning to be puzzled about it, instead of just telling you the story that she told you in the beginning. I mean, that story meant simply: “All I need is a good mummy and a good daddy, will you be a good mummy and daddy to me?” And, of course, the more you try to be a good mummy and a good daddy, the more you will be accused of seducing her and violating her, and so on. JSM: Now, there is a serious problem that has been swelling for months. Since almost the beginning of her analysis Sophie didn’t want me to wait for her to come up the lift to my apartment, and then to accompany her from the outside door of the apartment along the corridor into my consulting room as I have always done with everyone else. Instead, she wished me to open the outside door of the building to her, leaving the door of my apartment open for her to get in unaccompanied, while I should move to the consulting room where I should then wait for her. She would then come up the lift, enter my apartment, herself close the door of the apartment, walk along the corridor, and meet me in my consulting room where I was supposed to be waiting for her. She insisted time and again that she would really not want me to wait for her at the door of my apartment to accompany her to the consulting room. Then, when the session is over, she wants

12 A passionate interest in mental life

me to stay in the consulting room and not accompany her back to the outside door of my apartment. She wished to do it all by herself. Furthermore, she also forestalls my telling her when the session comes to an end: at the precise last minute of each session she would interrupt herself or me, saying: “Now I have to go.” When I asked her why she didn’t want me to wait for her at the apartment door, she told me that she didn’t want to bother me more than what she strictly has to. I considered all sorts of ideas that might hide behind her strange strategy, asking myself a hundred times what sort of traumatic experiences she might have gone through even if I am still unable to see it emerging in the material. DM: You have to insist that it is your method. JSM: I did of course often insist with her but she adamantly opposes it and I could still not see, in the material, any evidence upon which I could then ground an interpretation and put an end to this, or discover some serious, though still untold motive for her terrible insistence. DM: You must tell her that “This is my method; it’s my consulting room; you come here for me to be your analyst, so you mustn’t start by telling me what to do or how to do it. This is my method – do it.” JSM: I of course insisted quite many times and yet she always forcefully argued with me, trying – and indeed in the end succeeding – to get me to comply with her demands while I still wonder . . . DM: . . . well, don’t do it. JSM: Furthermore, there really is something particularly irritating in her demeanor, specially in the forceful and quite imposing undertone that the music of her voice very efficiently carries deeply into me demanding me to strictly obey her. I feel increasingly irritated with her. This seriously hampers my concentration in the sessions. So I decided to ask the advice of two experienced colleagues. They both converged in that her phantasies, whatever they may be, should somehow show up in the material and then I would be able to work it out. DM: Just don’t let her control you. Tell her: “You are usurping my prerogatives. This is my consulting room; I decide when to ask you to come in, and I decide when it is time for you to leave.” JSM: And would you just tell her in those words, full stop? DM: Yes! Yes, of course! JSM: . . . but is this therapeutically acceptable, to intervene like that?

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DM: Of course! JSM: So her rather crazy burst of triumph about wrecking her family, about crushing her father and bend him down to his knees . . . yes . . . this is exactly what I have been allowing her to do with me, down on my knees . . . I see . . . Now I begin to realize that the persistently evading material I have been searching for has however always been just in front of my eyes but I haven’t seen it . . . all this material is already crowded with evidence of the meaning of her behavior . . . The tornado you mentioned before was already shaking me rather violently and yet I was unable to see it! . . . Her controlling the household of her ex-husband’s mother; her systematically taking by storm her father’s place at the table; her lecturing everyone about children, and so on . . . DM: Quite! One thing you know is that she is a terribly controlling, tyrannical person, and you mustn’t let her control you and interfere with your doing things your way! JSM: Yes . . . I see . . . Now, let me now go back to the beginning of this report. Why do you think that she has brought her first dream? I mean, nightmares, nightmares, nightmares; and resentful accusation after resentful accusation; and everyone violates her and steals from her something precious, and so on. And then, all of a sudden, she brings a dream of a nice tender woman childcare officer, and she shifts from being betrayed, abandoned, and persecuted, to the inverse position, both in her dream and in her associations, of being herself the betrayer, the persecutor, etc. DM: Well, I think it’s best to see it in terms of the analytic situation beginning to disturb the organization that she has made of her life, in the various spaces of her life. The transference process has begun to be shifted around; you have introduced by the analytic method a certain turbulence, a certain flux into what has been, for years, a crystallized neurosis, with this big area, which she calls “nightmares” and I call her masochistic sexual phantasies and masturbatory processes. This whole crystallized situation is beginning to melt and become liquid. I think that it’s best to view it that way, and not to try to answer too many questions in your own mind. You see, one of the great values of baby observation is that it forces you to just observe – to observe for months and months without trying to interpret. JSM: She often begins a new session by saying: “. . . and . . .”, really as if there has been no break in her talking to me between the previous session and the present one suggesting, it seems, the strength of her attachment to analysis. DM: Yes, but the evolution of the transference hasn’t really started yet; the transference is still gathering, because it has been so stuck to these other figures for so

14 A passionate interest in mental life

many years, you see. But it has been loosened from them; it has been loosened from her mother, from her father, from her daughter. And as it gets loosened, it will come into the analytic transference, and then it will begin to turn over, and turn over, and evolve. It’s of course important that she is so linked to you. JSM: Sometimes I wonder that something quite uncommon may have happened in the story of her development. DM: The only thing that stands out so far is that she is extraordinarily vital, she is extremely intelligent, and she is probably gifted in ways that she has never made any great use of.

Note 1. One day, during a short coffee break during a clinical seminar in Lisbon, Meltzer stayed in the room talking to a senior colleague and to me. This colleague raised the question of whether senior analysts should still ask other colleagues for advice and guidance. Meltzer’s answer was this: “Oh, analysts who stop asking for supervision are finished, really.” In a seminar held in LA, already in his late years, Bion described as hopeless the analysts who, no matter how experienced, keep working without the scrutinizing assistance of colleagues, on the assumption that their way of doing things is correct. No analyst, Bion then claimed, is ever prepared to face, unassisted, the defeating complexity intrinsic to their work. (cf. Bion 2013, p. 19)

CHAPTER 2 Experiencing the session in the transference versus experiencing it outside the transference is seen as the fundamental difference between leading an analysis or a psychotherapy

Summary This chapter discusses the question described in the title. The merits of the former way of working are extensively argued. Concrete clinical evidence supporting this understanding is discussed. At the core of this discussion seems to lie the key question of the concreteness of unconscious phantasies. This question was the nub of the Controversies 1941–1945 (cf. King & Steiner, 1991). Experiencing the course of an analysis outside the transference is believed to severely impoverish both the analysand’s and the analyst’s emotional experiences of the analytic process, and therefore also, of the truth of the emotional conflicts implied in every analysis. Interpreting outside the transference is thought to deceive the patient at a deep emotional level and to immediately discourage further development of the transference. Keeping things outside the transference is seen to draw a frontier between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. NB: The first session presented here immediately follows the last one discussed in the previous chapter.

JSM: Sophie dreamed that she heard someone praising the brother of a woman friend. During the time they were both attending the same school her friend looked so much like herself that their teachers often confused them. Although she doesn’t know her brother, she has always thought of him as a wonderful person, being full of qualities. And in fact, she believes, he is admired by everyone. In her dream, the friend was telling her that she was now divorcing her husband to marry

16 Experiencing the transference passionately

this man. Just before waking up, however, Sophie realized that her friend was telling her that she was going to marry her own brother, got very confused, and wondered: “How strange . . . being siblings, how can they possibly marry each other?! . . .” Still within the same dream, Sophie thought: “Should I have known him I would like him very much and I would wish to marry him.” Then Sophie went on: “Last night I dreamed that I have killed my ex-husband. It was a very long dream, full of people and of episodes, at the end of which someone told me that I have killed him in an attic.” As she reported this dream, I was surprised at being unable to hear, in the music of her voice, the slightest note of anxiety or even of malaise related to her killing her ex-husband. She even sounded both relieved and perhaps even amused. DM: So she falls in love with this man who had wonderful qualities and whose voice she is always hearing . . . guess who. Now, the question about the space inside which she takes action in view of her new aim to marry this wonderful man is not revealed in the first dream. The first dream only makes reference to time; to the past. The trouble about marrying this man is that it would be incestuous but, in the first dream, she doesn’t take action. Now, in the second dream, the inside is represented by this killing of her ex-husband in the attic. That is a representation of destroying all interest about him, any love that is left over, anything that she feels for her ex-husband in order to clear the attic for a new person to come in to that place. That is a reference to the internal situation; and of course, the problem of the incestuousness she already put in the first dream indicates that it is her father whose place she now cleans out, in her mind, in order to make space for her new husband-father. JSM: It seems interesting that she has always denied having any good things inside her. I wonder whether this sort of “emptying the attic inside her” for the next representative of her father, emptying it of all good feelings, attachments, emotional links, and memories bonding her to her ex-husband is not connected with her idea of having nothing good inside her, of being unable to keep any good things inside her, and to be faithful to them. DM: Yes . . . You see, it is always a problem in analysis the tendency of the patient to replace old objects by new ones instead of assimilate into her old objects the qualities of new ones, thus enriching the internal objects. This constitutes a kind of unfaithfulness to the original objects, as you said, and one needs to be a bit suspicious about it. It is very much like what a child may do with a stepfather or a stepmother . . . to become so enamored of them that they replace the original father. JSM: The other claim she fires against her ex-husband is that he often had premature ejaculation. She was absolutely mad about it, wishing to beat him and kill him.

Experiencing the transference passionately 17

DM: Why, did she feel that he did this on purpose to frustrate her? JSM: Well, what she told me was that he told her that this has never happened to him either before or after living with her . . . DM: . . . implying that it was her fault . . . JSM: Apparently. DM: And did he say what it was about her that caused him to have premature ejaculation? JSM: She did not tell me; but I did raise the issue to her about her extreme greediness, her desperation to cut off her father’s head, to swallow him up, feeling so triumphant over her powerful father’s penis, relishing in having him kneel down before her – again the Caravaggio painting. My feeling about it is that he might perhaps be taken aback in the face of her ravenousness. I felt it in the overwhelming intensity of the music of her voice as well as by the way she looked at me when she jumped on her feet, glued against the wall and firing her rather crazy triumphant at me: “I got him!!” DM: Right . . . Ok . . . JSM: “Last Saturday I had a terrible dream . . . This is for you to see how my week-ends are. In my dream, I was with a man whom I know very well and I would like to make love to. However, we couldn’t find a place to be together. We entered a big building which looked like a big conference-room in some hotel, trying to find a vacant room, but we couldn’t find any. The doors were all closed. We finally left without making love. In the next dream I was with another man in a kitchen. He was threatening me with a pin. He has got AIDS and the pin was infected. In my dream, the pin turned into a blade. It was awful! I was terrified and, in the dream, called my mother for help.” DM: Now, the point about this man is really that he is showing her this pin which then turns into a blade. There is no evidence from her telling the dream that he was in fact attacking her. Just showing it to her in a threatening way. This means exhibitionism; that he is exhibiting his penis. And, in that way, injecting into her all these dangerous sexual ideas, and excitement, and desires – and this is represented by AIDS – infecting her with all these thoughts and feelings. Now, how would that fit with the previous dream, in which she is with a man that she knows very well, and is wanting to go to bed with him but cannot find a room? They are really opposite sides of the same coin but it is all centered on the penis. When her active, seductive desires are unsuccessful, the implication is that mother has closed all the doors, the situation flips over, and it is changed into the opposite situation

18 Experiencing the transference passionately

where it is daddy’s fault, (now mimicking a little girl’s voice) “he is always exhibiting his penis to me, and filling me with these bad thoughts! I’ll tell mummy about it. ‘Mummy, he is exhibiting his penis to me again!’.” Now, it is very easy to show her this in the transference. There is a phantasy that you would like to go to bed with her and your wife won’t allow you to; she keeps all the doors closed, and that makes her angry that you are so dominated by your wife, that you won’t express your true desires for her. And this enrages her with you and she would like to get you in trouble by proclaiming publicly that you have exhibited your penis, that you are a pervert, that you are an exhibitionist . . . JSM: My consulting room is in my flat, and in fact, it is located at the end of a long corridor with several closed doors . . . DM: So she has to ring a bell downstairs at the outside of the building, you open the door for her, then she goes up in a lift, you then open the door of your flat, and you go straight through to a room at the end of the corridor? JSM: Yes . . . in fact the entrance hall and the corridor along which she walks have . . . let me see . . . eight closed doors . . . DM: So, you see, you just transplant the dream into the analytic situation and show her the concrete geography of it . . . JSM: The exact geography of her dream, yes! . . . Now, don’t you think that the infected pin, which turns into a blade, also refers to her father’s penis which she is desperate to possess and take full control over actually infecting her mind with nightmares and colic, and indeed, her whole life? DM: Yes, but you could have told her this if you were sticking close to the transference and to interpret how your ideas and what you tell her impinge upon her as filthy ideas, you see . . . You could easily interpret that in the transference. By doing this you easily document it for her, you see. Many people tend to operate in the opposite way, to take dreams and other material outside the analysis, and then just transfer it back to the analysis. This clearly weakens the impact of the meaning of the material. Whereas if you operate in this way, by sticking to what really happens in the analysis, then you can show her the evidence that lies behind it. JSM: I see, yes . . . Now, in the beginning of this session, I told her that I have decided not to yield any longer to her wish not to have me waiting for her at the outside door of my apartment every time she arrives for a session, as well as not to see me accompanying her back to the outside door as I have always done with everyone else so far and will from now on to continue doing so. DM: So let’s see how she now responds to it . . .

Experiencing the transference passionately 19

JSM: Besides, I also asked her not to interrupt a session any more, unless, of course, she wishes to leave, deciding when the session should be brought to an end, for this is entirely of my own responsibility to decide. I told her: “I have been yielding to your wish thinking that I should wait until the anxieties I believed might underlie your behavior and your determination to take control of my way of doing things in my consulting-room could be brought into analysis in either your dreams or otherwise thus allowing me to see its meaning, and then enabling me to fully discuss it with you. I regret, however, having not been able to see the amount of concrete evidence you have already been given to me of the powerfully intrusive little Sophie who cannot refrain from controlling everyone’s private space and intimacy. You have taken full control of your ex-husband’s mother’s house down to every minute detail; to take by storm your parents’ bed-room, firing Florence out, taking over your mother’s role and authority as represented by your lecturing your friends on babies; teaching your father what he should do and even think. And every time I yield to your will I now think that I’m reinforcing your omnipotent illusion that little intrusive Sophie actually has total power over your parents’ intimacy, over their inner space, and over my own intimacy. Besides, you take by storm your father’s place at the table, your mother’s place at the table, and forcefully impose on everyone else at home the place at the table you decide to be yours, just as you have been trying – and indeed largely succeeding – doing here. I therefore have unfortunately been feeding your belief that you have power over my wife and my own intimacy, as you have just showed it to me by emptying the attic and killing your ex-husband without a trace of anxiety.” DM: That’s a perfectly adequate explanation of your reasons . . . Very good! . . . Right! . . . Now, let’s see what happened. JSM: She was so astonished with what I told her that she literally jumped on the couch, sitting down, staring at me in silence for a minute or so, then saying: “But I never wished to control you . . . All I wanted was to spare you from the useless trouble of walking me from the outside door to the consulting-room and back again to the outside door. I didn’t want to bother you with me strictly beyond what you have already to.” Now, just one hour before the beginning of the next session she called me saying: “I think I’m becoming ill . . . I don’t know if I can go . . . I’m feeling ill . . .” I answered her that it was up to her to decide whether she wishes to come to her session, and that if she decides to come I will of course wait for her. She finally decided not to come. In spite of the peculiarity of the situation I nevertheless truly wished her to recover. DM: Well, one can’t behave like a brick wall, really . . . Nevertheless you remember that you said it and it’s important to watch the material for her response to it. One of the things I learnt from Roger Money-Kyrle was that kindness is the first thing in analytic technique. To be as kind as you can. But of course, kindness and weakness are very close to one another.

20 Experiencing the transference passionately

JSM: Dangerously close, yes. Kindness, weakness, and seduction, I feel, seduction being perhaps the widest used device to cover up incompetence and cowardice. DM: Yes. [cf. end-note to Chapter 1] JSM: The following session she didn’t come either. In the session after this one I suggested that her illness was a response to the previous session in which I decided to stop yielding to her continuous pressure on me to break my rules as a powerful strategy to take full control over my intimacy and to make me kneel down to all her wishes and “feed your triumphant feeling that ‘Now I got him!’ as you told me you were going to try to do with your father,” but she immediately denied everything I said. – “I’ve got a mysterious sinusitis.” She however called her gastro-enterologist, whom she knows for years and is strongly attached to. He prescribed, over the telephone, a common drug to cope with her quite manageable fever. She then told me again that all she wanted in asking me not to wait for her at the outside door of my apartment was to spare me useless annoyance, etc. . . . I suggested that she may not want me to follow her along the corridor to the outside door because she might feel persecuted by me with an infected pin or blade and is afraid of being violated. DM: Yes, that’s a very good point. That by the end of the session, your following her to the door would be following her with your blade in hand, whereas, when she is coming to the session, if you are accompanying her, you would be passing door after door after door, and none of them would be suitable for love making just like the closed doors in that big hotel. So, it has flipped over during the session, because you have disappointed her. JSM: I was surprised when she entirely confirmed my suggestion. I also suggested that this is how she seems to constantly project these persecutory anxieties into everyone whose intimacy she cannot bear, struggling to take control over. DM: Now, I would say, it’s not necessary to go into how she constantly projects them into others. Stay in the transference; it’s enough, really. You don’t really have to go beyond the borders of the transference. You know, patients often feel that you take advantage of the knowledge in the transference to accuse them elsewhere. And many patients feel very hurt by that, as if you have tricked them into revealing something, which belongs to the transference, and then they’re accused of doing it everywhere. So, I think that it’s not necessary and it’s not useful to immediately generalize . . . JSM: . . . otherwise I may be disturbing the dynamics of the gathering of the transference, yes. All that has now been converging on me; so I may suddenly have sent her away . . .

Experiencing the transference passionately 21

DM: Quite. JSM: Then she told me that, in fact, she could never bear to be accompanied to the outside door by anyone, even by her parents, particularly if she had to go through a long a corridor. DM: You see, in fact, that looks as if she is confirming what you said. But it also has the effect of saying: “Oh yes, what happens here is no different from what happens everywhere,” and, in that way, weakening the impact of the transference. JSM: Oh I see! . . . yes . . . She herself immediately generalizes it . . . DM: Now, it’s interesting to me that she got ill after you reversed this. I’ll tell you a little story about the opposite situation. I had a little girl in analysis. She was about 7 at the time, and this was about her second year of analysis. A fascinating, intelligent child. Her blue pencil, with which she was drawing a lot, has worn down to nothing. She asked me to get a new one and I said: “Yes, I’ll have it for you next time.” And I did buy the pencil but forgot to put it in her box. The next time she said to me: “You didn’t get my pencil.” And I said: “Oh yes, I did, but I forgot to put it in your box. I might as well get it for you now.” I might – as well – get it – for you – now . . . So I went out of the room, fetched the pencil and brought it back. Next session she was ill; she was ill for two weeks with pneumonia . . . When she came back, she said to me: “It was all your fault!” I said: “How do you know?” And she answered: “Because of the dream I had that night.” This was a couple of weeks before Christmas. Then she said: “That night I had a dream. I dreamed that I was looking at the cupboard at home and I saw Christmas presents all packed up and hidden in there, and I said to my father ‘Oh, there are my Christmas presents!’, and he said ‘Yes, you might as well have them now.’” You might – as well – have – them – now . . . As if to say to daddy, “ohhhh, there is your penis, in your trousers” – “You might – as well – have – it – now; no need to wait till you’re eighteen or twenty.” JSM: Absolutely amazing!! . . . DM: By the next day she had a pneumonia . . . the next day . . . JSM: . . . and she herself told you: “that’s all your fault”?! DM: She told me, pinpointing to that dream (smiling sweetly) . . . She was a remarkable child; and she’s a remarkable woman, actually. You see, technical mistakes can be very dangerous. JSM: Now, the next two sessions she didn’t come for she again felt ill. Then, at the beginning of next time, she told me: “All these days and nights were awful.

22 Experiencing the transference passionately

I have got fever, awful nightmares, digestive troubles . . .” Every suggestion I made about the substance of the anxieties underlying her getting ill were immediately wiped off, sometimes even before listening to me. DM: But the emphasis, I would say, is on this mysterious sinusitis and the mystery of why did you change your mind . . . and this is that you were talking to somebody about it; a third party entered into the situation, you see. And the mystery is who were you talking to. So here comes the Oedipal situation again. “Oh, you talked to mummy about it . . . that’s why you said I can’t sit on your lap anymore. We used to have such fun. . . .” JSM: Yes, yes . . . Something is really happening on her back . . . She is no longer the only one daddy talks to and confides his thoughts. You are now speaking to the person who closes all doors, yes . . . However, she again denied, one after another, every single finding that she herself has clearly made in previous sessions. DM: You have brought things into a real crisis by this change of technique. I mean, this is terribly important. The moment comes, in almost every analysis, when a patient says: “Is this completely confidential?” And I asked them: “What do you mean by ‘confidential’?” – “Do you ever talk to anybody about it?” And I say: “Of course! Whenever I feel myself in any difficulty, I have other colleagues with whom I discuss these problems. Why, would you rather wish me never to talk to anybody about it and just went on making mistakes?” – “Well, who do you talk to?” – “Colleagues who talk to me about their patients, and I talk with them about mine.” You see, here comes the concrete Oedipal complex again; mummy talks to daddy and daddy talks to mummy, and you can’t say to daddy: “Don’t tell mummy.” You can’t say to mummy: “Don’t tell daddy.” JSM: And would you word your thoughts in these exact terms? DM: Yes, of course! JSM: Ok. – “Last night I had an awful dream. I dreamed that I was walking along a dangerous road that draws a frontier line between the safe and welfare area of the ‘Crazy Place’ where I lived for about two years immediately after having concluded my PhD, and just a contiguous, terribly dangerous area. Suddenly, a horrible prostitute, who got AIDS, came across and thrust her long nails at me, at my pulses, with the purpose of infecting me, and I felt unable to flee the area. You know, it’s strange but I feel very much identified with all these awful people . . . prostitutes, drug addicts, dealers, thieves, criminals . . . I’m not so different from them as it may seem. All these people interest me and this is because I must have a lot in common with them. I’ve never been a prostitute or drug addicted or alcoholic, and yet I feel close to them.”

Experiencing the transference passionately 23

DM: The description of this road is a perfect illustration of the idea of borderline mental state. I think that when you come to people whose lives are involved strongly with projective identification – as I think this patient is, probably – there is a borderline area of the personality. Did she say: “All these people interest me”? JSM: Yes, exactly in these very words. DM: It is very interesting . . . JSM: So I again described these two sides of her, the intrusive side of her, trying to creep into my intimacy and take control over it, pressuring me to change my method, storming into parents’ bed-room invading their intimacy, etc. . . . , as if inhabiting the other side of this road . . . DM: . . . yes . . . well, it’s true that you have this material that the girl looked exactly like her, whose brother was a marvelous person, and so on. But I think that the more important problem is really the differentiation of adult and infantile. It’s really the differentiation of levels in her that is confused. She really cannot differentiate the child from the adult in her. I mean, everybody has lack of integration, of course. But people who are really deeply split present a different clinical picture. And the true adult and the infantile are not differentiated because there is this pseudo-maturity that makes them indistinguishable.1 It doesn’t seem to me that she is a particularly split personality. The dangerous side of that road is the nightmare area of her life. JSM: It was interesting that, in her dream, she said “I felt unable to flee the area,” as if suggesting being trapped into it, the claustrophobic side of it, as if addicted to it. DM: Yes . . . That’s really important. JSM: She then went back again to the nature of her wish not to bother me beyond what I already have to be by making me waiting for her, etc., though now adding: “For I need to come here; I need you.” DM: But there is a mystery about why you were weak with her, and that mystery means to her that you were under her control and then, suddenly, some prostitute talked to you and you changed your mind, because you’re so weak that you listen to the prostitute instead of listening to her. I mean, you are under accusation of weakness . . . JSM: . . . of course . . .

24 Experiencing the transference passionately

DM: . . . but it’s all right if you’re weak with her, but not if you’re weak with your prostitute-wife who made you change your mind. JSM: . . . the one who closes all the doors . . . DM: . . . yes. So, that is the problem now; it has shifted to this woman . . . this woman with the infected nails that you are so frightened of . . . that you acquiesce in her jealousy and reverse your procedure not letting your little girl sit on your lap anymore. JSM: Actually, she called me one of these days and it was my wife who answered the telephone. So for the first time she heard a feminine voice in my house. DM: Oh yes? . . . your wife answered the phone? JSM: Answered the phone, and my wife told me that the woman who has called, as soon as she heard her voice, sounded astonished and swiftly terminated the conversation saying that she would call back later. DM: Ok . . . So the Oedipal complex has surfaced, it has been there all the time, and she was so triumphant over any other woman in your life that it didn’t figure. But now, suddenly, it figures. JSM: So I stopped yielding to her because I am now yielding to this prostitutewife with the infected nails whose real voice she now heard . . . DM: . . . yes . . . I think that you have reached a very interesting point with her; it is moving in a very exciting way. But I think that you should stick more to the transference; and you should wait for the material, and enrich it by questioning her more: “I don’t understand,” or “what do you mean by that,” and so on. This is important in order to get a richer material. And wait about interpreting. It isn’t so urgent to interpret; it’s more urgent for the patient to enrich the material and allow it to develop so she herself may become aware of what’s going on . . . there is plenty of time for interpreting. JSM: The theory may as well be experienced as a third party intruding into it and impoverishing the quality of the listening, indicating that the analyst is now obeying someone else, aggravate the analysand’s experience of the vividness of the Oedipus complex? DM: Yes. JSM: The theory as the prostitute sticking out her infected nails . . .

Experiencing the transference passionately 25

DM: The theoretical things become gradually clear . . . relentlessly, you might say. But pay more attention to the technique; it is important to keep the technique firm, to maintain an interest that doesn’t lap into being omniscient about it, you see; to give the patient plenty of time to talk, while, at the same time, reserving for yourself enough space when you need to talk. But not to jump in too quickly . . . I think that it was a shock to her and that she probably did get a bit ill . . . when did she have this telephone call with your wife? JSM: Immediately before the second illness. DM: So she had two illnesses . . . two shocks . . . Her first illness was pretty promptly after you changed your technique . . . JSM: Immediately after, yes; the next session she didn’t come saying that she felt ill . . . DM: . . . immediately; this is interesting . . . and probably the second illness fairly quickly also . . . JSM: Yes, immediately before this threatening prostitute showed up in her dream. DM: When did the dream of the prostitute come, do you know? JSM: Before the phone call . . . DM: So after the phone call, the dream . . . so it was part of the reaction to it . . . Well, it’s very interesting, really . . . But it shows you, you see, that a man therapist with a woman makes it very difficult to find a maternal transference. Because the fact of his being a man brings forward all this paternal transference, and if the patient feels at all successful in becoming your darling, the mother is just kept in the background as a housekeeper, as it were, and you just get glimpses of her in the distance. It’s only when the technique becomes really firm, and the patient feels really firmly held, and not successful in seducing or controlling, that the mother comes forward and the maternal transference may begin to develop. Sometimes the mother comes forward when she calls for help because daddy is being bad to her, but sometimes she comes forward as this aggressive mummy who has caught to daddy indulging her, and so on. The center still is daddy, you see. Once, however, you’ve established the triangular configuration, then the maternal transference, the positive dependent transference on the mother, begins to come forward much, much more. And I think that is what you can expect. JSM: Outwardly Sophie seems to be greatly improving in all her initial symptoms . . .

26 Experiencing the transference passionately

DM: Yes . . . outwardly, as you said. For, you see, a lot of transference cures in analysis are of this sort, and the patients break down later. They remain in an idealized level and doesn’t really get at the Oedipus complex.

Note 1. For the concept of pseudo-maturity, cf. Meltzer, 1992, pp. 15, ff.

CHAPTER 3 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst though also as actings in the transference

Summary The difference between the analysand’s experience of the analysis with analysts who believe they know what goes on in the sessions versus those who experience the clinical hour mostly in puzzlement and uncertainty, is discussed. Dreams seem often unconsciously experienced by the analysand as babies she or he brings the analyst in response to his deep interest in the analysand’s dreams. These “babies” may however sometimes be actings in the transference. This view is illustrated by the clinical material discussed below. This chapter describes some of the forms in which the maternal transference seems to surface in the course of an analysis. Further evidence of the gathering of the transference and of its key importance in laying the fundamental structure of the analysis is discussed. NB: The first session of this report immediately follows the last one presented in the previous chapter.

JSM: Before starting, I would like to ask you if you could let me know every thoughts and feelings that may seem to you to somehow speak of my countertransference. It would greatly assist me in seeing things more clearly. DM: It is very difficult to see the counter-transference in a supervision. That’s why I’m very reluctant to comment on it. But when there is an acting in the counter-transference, that I can see, and that I will point out.

28 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

JSM: Good. – “I dreamed that the father of a former colleague of mine at school died and I went to the death-watch. This colleague has never been a friend of mine. There was something strange about this death-watch. It took place in the church, at the school in which I studied for many years, but the whole scene there didn’t look like a death-watch at all: everything was so stiff, the benches, the inside of the church, the people . . . everything disposed in such a stiff, rigid way . . . it was very confusing because I didn’t know exactly through what doors or windows I have entered.” DM: Are her parents alive? JSM: Yes, both. DM: Ok . . . So, here we have a dream that goes in some direction to recognize that this is related to childhood, and to child relationships. And that this church is a representation of the mother’s body. It’s really a primal scene dream, but a dream in which she says that the penis is being admitted into the mother’s body because it is dead and has to be buried in the mother’s body. And in that way she takes the life out of it, you see, which is represented here by the rigidity of everything. So this is the consequence of your talking about your wife as if she says: “Oh, yes, you are married” – that is, your penis has been married but has died and has been buried in your wife. So she allows you to have a wife but that your sexual relationship has died maybe years ago. There’s a mixture between whole and part objects, that the parental couple are dealt with as whole objects, but the genitals as part objects; and then she realizes that the child in her doesn’t even know where the penis enters the mother’s body . . . is it through the mouth, the rectum, the vagina? . . . that she is confused about the portal of entry for the penis. And it’s interesting . . . (reads) “I didn’t know exactly through what doors or windows . . .” – did she say “or windows”? . . . JSM: Yes. DM: This is very interesting because it includes the eyes as a portal of entry. JSM: I was surprised when she herself said: “This is certainly a clear dream, and yet I can’t see what it means.” DM: That again is an emphasis on seeing . . . seeing . . . she cannot see where the penis enters into the mother . . . it’s very interesting . . . JSM: . . . being unable to “see” in the sense of understanding, that is, to clearly represent it in her mind, leaving her struggling with confusion. DM: Yes . . . so in a sense, becoming less confused because she becomes aware that she doesn’t understand. That is really a lessening of confusion. I mean, the

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 29

confused person doesn’t even know that there is a problem. When we speak about confusional states the patient doesn’t feel confused. When the time comes when they feel confused they are already coming to terms with the problem. JSM: Yes, yes! Since I had to cancel the previous session and this was an unplanned cancellation I thought that she might have felt the urge to enter her mother’s body again, but she was confused about what “entry” should she better take. This, I thought, seemed to suggest that she was confused about both the qualities and functions of her mother’s body. DM: Right . . . JSM: . . . confused about her mother’s internal spaces: the good space where her mother can receive her anxieties (as when she calls her for help because of the man who was threatening her with an infected pin), and yet a bad space when an unplanned separation occurs, etc. DM: Right. Ok . . . But, you see, in this dream, the church is not a bad space . . . it’s a good space but with a dead penis . . . JSM: It appears to be a good space, and yet it is full of disquieting elements. Though it is the church of her school where she greatly enjoyed studying for many years, she now doesn’t know where to enter it and seems anxious about it. Besides, she went there to attend a dead watch, but was it a dead watch? It didn’t seem to her like one. Moreover, her colleague whose father has died had never been friend of hers. So there seems to be an atmosphere of disquiet, even perhaps of threat, and in this sense, a bad space. DM: “Bad” not in the sense of disappointing, and pain-provoking, but in the sense of persecution, indicating danger, cruelty, and so on. The persecutory object almost always turns out to be what Kohut has called a self-object . . . I don’t known whether he knows what a self-object is (laughter . . .) but it is an object that has been penetrated by part of the personality, by part of the self, and therefore it is an object which is dominated by this projected part of the self, as one sees in the paranoias, and so on. So there is a difference between bad, meaning disappointing, frustrating, and so on, and persecution, meaning danger and a malignant quality. JSM: Both sides appear to be in her dream. The church seems to have been penetrated by a dead object, as you said, by father’s dead penis . . . DM: . . . ok. JSM: Besides, when she finally enters the church, she finds her father’s dead penis inside a stiff, unfamiliar, strange space. It is no longer exciting. She seems to be struggling to discern the qualities of her own internal spaces.

30 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

DM: Yes . . . yes . . . the stiffness is really the deadness, as having the life taken out of it . . . JSM: And she seems shifting her rather crazy “interest” in her father’s penis to the analyst’s . . . DM: . . . yes; its coming. But what is encouraging, in this dream, is that it comes a little closer to the maternal transference. JSM: I was upset about my having been unable to interpret more directly in this direction. Fortunately, however, later I had a good opportunity to go back to it ... DM: . . . oh it’s always like that . . . every time you are finally understanding and get it interpreted, you realize that it has been happening for weeks, even months, and that you missed it, and you missed it, and you missed it . . . but this is also because the patient leads you around in circles, you see, he doesn’t go straight forward, and so you can’t go straight forward; you have to follow him around, and around . . . JSM: “The other day” – she went on – “I had a bitter quarrel at the university and thought: how good it would be for me if only I could have my ex-husband at my side to help me out with this.” DM: So, again, it gives you an opportunity to interpret to her reluctance to acknowledge how dependent she is becoming upon you – “at my side,” she said, meaning “in support” . . . as a protective and supportive father figure, performing paternal functions in her life . . . it’s the functions that are important. Whereas the erotic transference goes to the figure, the dependence goes to the function. JSM: She still added: “We have something important in common and that’s my daughter.” DM: Right, you see, the child in her is what she and you have in common. JSM: Do you think that her wish for a “reconciliation” could represent an incipient progress in her capacity not to split so sharply between the good and the bad parts of herself and of the object instead of being driven to immediately substitute one good internal figure by another, she was rather leaning toward improving the qualities of the former, thus representing a lessening of what appeared to be her unfaithfulness, following your suggestion about the dream of emptying the attic? DM: I think it doesn’t yet represent the lessening of the splitting. It represents only an attempt to find the good object though also a resistance to find it in the

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 31

transference. So it’s an attempt to find it, yes. But it does probably also represent a lessening of her interest in the sado-masochistic relationship to the bad object, and a greater interest in having a good relationship, and that represents probably some progress. But you see, now the question is to locate this good object, which she is resisting. JSM: I see . . . She may perhaps have made some progress from the first dream of her analysis, the dream of the nice child-care officer and the question: “Is it better to have a happy childhood and an unhappy adult life, or an unhappy childhood and a happy adult life?” DM: Probably, yes. JSM: “I dreamed about you” – she said in the beginning of the next session, in a pleased tone of voice, even before being accommodated on the couch – “I was in a party and you were there. I was talking to a man, a friend of mine with whom I had a love affair but whom I have not seen for a long time now. He has made a video-film and the man who was responsible for the sound was also there. And I saw the entire video!” – she said, emphatically – “It was a film with puppets and they looked like those figures made by a computer. I was seducing that man and you passed by, grasped what was going on, and smiled, quietly. Then I was talking to a woman friend of mine whom I often meet in my dreams, whom however I have also not seen for a long time. In the dream we were talking about something I can’t remember” – she now said, in a tone of voice clearly indicating that she was trying very hard to recall what it was that they were all talking about – “The last time I dreamed about her it was so funny, she was telling me that she wished to have ten children whose names should all begin with an ‘M.’ But this time the conversation was even more exciting! . . . We were talking about having children, but I can’t remember any more details . . .” DM: So that’s a real little girl conversation . . . (now mimicking the voices of little girls chattering together about having babies) “ten children . . . I’m going to marry daddy. . . .” A four, five-year-old child, you see . . . JSM: “The dream” – she went on – “had an extraordinary end! . . . but I can’t remember it either. It was awfully difficult for me to wake up. I had to wake up because of practical matters but I hastened in doing all I had to do so that I could quickly go back to sleep again to continue my dream. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t succeed in resuming it.” She repeated any number of times that her dream had “an extraordinary end.” DM: She really liked that dream . . . It’s a very transparent dream, really, in which you appear as the daddy she is seducing, and you appear also as the mother whom she is chattering about having babies. But it’s interesting because you also

32 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

appear as the analyst . . . the analyst who is observing her infantile attachment to you both as daddy and as mummy. It’s interesting that she enjoyed this dream so much. JSM: And yet, I was somehow puzzled because she said: “This was not a nightmare.” DM: Oh! but it wasn’t a nightmare at all! JSM: I’m not so sure that it wasn’t. For there were some points in her narrative in which some painful undertone could clearly be heard in the music of her voice though it wasn’t clear what exactly was painful in this apparently overall pleasing dream. Something in it seems to have bordered on a nightmare, and this was, I think . . . DM: . . . yes . . . yes . . . the painful thing she hasn’t told you; actually two painful things . . . One of the things she hasn’t told you was the content of the puppet video . . . that’s the part-object aspect of her dream, I think. But she also hasn’t told you this extraordinary ending . . . JSM: . . . exactly; you will soon see where both points seem to have led to. One of her associations emerged in the form of a previous dream she hasn’t told me. She now said: “The other day I dreamed that I was with a woman friend of mine. She is completely mad. In my dream we were jumping and doing mad things in the streets of Australia. Suddenly, I saw my mother’s grand-father still looking like a young man. I can only recall him already as a very old man. In my dream, however, he was climbing a steep ladder leaning against a wall. Suddenly, the stairs detached from the wall and he fell down and died.” She then told me that her mother loved him very dearly and used to praise him very much saying that he was so strong and funny and intelligent. Sophie always had a marvelous image of him. By contrast, Sophie added, her mother never liked her own father (Sophie’s paternal grand-father). I suggested that she went to Australia, to the very antipodes of her observing analyst, as far on earth as she could go in order to allow the mad friend part of herself to do “mad things” . . . DM: Very often it comes up that the antipodes means the bottom . . . down at the bottom – the buttocks, the genitals, the anus, whatever. So I think this is a mad anal game she’s playing where there are two girls watching one another defecating, the feces representing this old grand-father. When grand-father becomes detached, as the feces becomes detached from the anus, from the body, and falls down into the water, so that’s the grand-father falling off and dying . . . So it’s an anal game between these two children, but of course it is also her mother presiding over her toilet training.

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 33

JSM: Yes: “you too were there and you passed by, grasped what I was doing, and smiled quietly” . . . DM: . . . quite. JSM: So I suggested that the “mad things” she dreamed that she was doing in “Australia” was about having ten babies with daddy-analyst. I got the feeling that the figure of her mother’s grand-father dying because of the “mad things” she was doing lent a new meaning to the content of her dream, at the very moment of her describing it in the session: it revealed something about the content of the video, as well as “its extraordinary end,” but I was unable to see what it was. DM: In the first dream you are represented as being there, observing her relationships with both her mother and her father, but somehow, by being there, contains the significance of protectiveness that she is yearning for, that you protect her from this dream becoming a nightmare. JSM: Yes, yes . . . She somehow seemed to walk on an edge and her dream could at any moment verge on to a nightmare . . . DM: . . . yes. In the second dream you don’t seem to be present and it has a tendency to become a nightmare with the death of the good grand-father. So you have a bit of transference for you particularly as a protective figure, protecting her from slipping into nightmares, but also, in so far as you are a protective father – a desexualized father – to protect her from the Oedipus complex – from wanting to kill the mother . . . (silence) . . . yes, the maternal figure comes through as this church-mummy, very rigid and stiff, desexualized, where daddy’s penis is buried when it’s dead. So, you see, the transference certainly is gathering and she is establishing you in a particular function of a protective figure, under whose protective eyes she can allow herself to experience infantile relationships. The fact that these infantile relationships are being experienced with you, that isn’t quite clear to her yet. For the moment they still are all there, with her husband, with her former lover, with her girlfriend, and so on, but they’re coming in, really. You can see it gathering. JSM: Yes . . . it’s very interesting, yes. Then I went back to the dream of the party. I suggested to her that she was actually seducing me, in the party, and she was so excited with the things she was imagining – the video full of the forbidden “mad things” she was doing with me but cannot recall – that she had to cut off some of her excitement by putting all those images in the form of rather cool, computermade puppets and, of course, by censoring the “extraordinary end.” I also told her that it seemed to me that she was talking to her woman friend about having children

34 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

with me and this was perhaps an important part of the “extraordinary ending” she had to forget as the session moved on to its end. “The child I’m referring to is the true and free Sophie she is hoping to give birth to in her analysis.” DM: That’s right, yes! . . . yes! . . . Now, you have put several things together and it seems a legitimate technique. She hasn’t told you what the video-film was about, but the remembered dream suggests it was full of mad childish things, which in this case seems to me toilet-games of some sort. The extraordinary end that she hasn’t remembered and the end of her grand-father falling off the ladder were also put together quite legitimately . . . But, I think . . . let me see . . . you may be right in the sense that the falling of the grand-father would eventually turn into giving birth to a baby who falls out from the mother’s body, but at this point it is more connected with the anxiety about the death, really, of causing the death, as you said . . . and that she confirms when she says that when she has nightmares she feels the urge to meet the people she dreamed of to be sure that he or she is well and alive [omitted piece]. So, there is some anxiety about omnipotence, yes . . . JSM: She seemed confused with the “mad things,” the childish excitement, I thought. DM: Yes, in that sense, out of control, yes . . . and I think you can see this image of the grand-father as she described him as a young man, climbing the ladder, but the ladder, at a certain moment, detach from the wall and boom! . . . I mean, that is so clearly the feces detaching from the anus . . . JSM: . . . and yet linked with death . . . DM: . . . but probably more associated with the way in which this pre-genital game is connected with the genital game, and instead of the feces coming out and falling into the water, a genital game of the penis going in and the penis itself turning into a baby, and then the coming out of the baby . . . will it be alive? will it be dead? will it be a good baby? will it be a fecal-baby? . . . That’s where the anxieties are, in the confusion between the pre-genital and the genital phantasies, and which generate all this anxiety about dead babies. I mean, this material, at present, is more about toilet training. And, of course, having ten babies means you defecate today one baby; you defecate tomorrow, two babies . . . it’s so easy, you might as well have a lot of them, you see (all laughed gently). It is more connected with fecal-babies, and producing babies easily from your bottom. JSM: Why do all the names begin with “M,” do you have any idea? DM: That is for you and me to investigate . . .

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 35

JSM: . . . it occurred to me that “M” may also stand for “Merda,” meaning in Portuguese “Shit.” There are some older people who, refraining from just saying “merda!”, they still sometimes say only “M,” not to say the whole word for courtesy. DM: Oh, yes . . . could be . . . yes, could be “M” for “Merda” . . . (laughter at Meltzer attempting to get the correct accent of the Portuguese word “Merda”) JSM: Ten pooh-babies! DM: Yes, yes . . . But again, these are things you have to investigate, to try to enrich the evidence, and to make interpretations based on evidence, you see, otherwise it doesn’t have the same impact as one that is based on bringing together evidence and giving it meaning. In many ways, the secret of a good analysis is, first of all, the establishment of a firm setting, and maintaining a firm technique, and the second is the art of getting rich material from the patient, because although patients may talk a lot, or they may be very imaginative, that isn’t the same as rich material which is really detailed, that gives you a clear visual picture of what is going on so that your mind can work with it unconsciously. So, it’s important to concentrate on getting rich material, which you mostly do by saying: “It isn’t clear to me”, or “I don’t understand this,” that sort of thing, you see. And you see it with children . . . the moment you confess that you don’t understand, or that you’re puzzled . . . Oh! they give you lots of more information; and adult patients are like that too, to a lesser degree. So long as you are puzzled, they will help you. If you know it all, well they are up against you to disprove it, to prove that you’re wrong, to prove that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But since it’s true that you don’t understand, it’s quite legitimate to say: “I don’t understand, I’m puzzled,” and so on. You’re not pretending to be puzzled, we are puzzled. You are admitting that the complexity of the situation really only allows for a little understanding at a time. And when you do think that you understand something, you will tell them, but in the meantime you are listening, and observing, and observing . . . observing . . . not wanting information, but wanting to be able to observe the picture that they have in their minds . . . They have to somehow project an image, by a form of projective identification that your mind can pick up in a visual, live way so that your mind can work imaginatively with it. JSM: The next session she told me that she dreamed of a child friend of her daughter who has always lived in a “strange house,” as she put it, with her mother, her grand-mother and an uncle, never seeing her father. “She is a sinister child, always trying to dominate everyone, always intriguing with somebody, and she is a liar. Besides, there is no happiness in her. I dreamed that this sinister child who makes a vivid impression on me discovered that her mother has a secret affair with a black man and had many children from him.”

36 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

DM: . . . all black pooh-pooh babies, you see . . . There certainly is a feeling that there is something that she considers sinister in herself, that has to do with some kind of anal sexuality. And while there is an attempt to acknowledge it, it also is dissociated and put on to this other child who is a friend of her daughter’s. So, that is the theme that I would want to follow because it is right down on the material and to go for this mother–daughter relationship which is coming into the transference having to do with the feeling that in the analysis you talk about dirty things together, you talk about feces, you talk about the penises, intercourse, and so on . . . all this sort of “dirty games,” you see. The maternal transference is coming into the analysis, but making its appearance as a mother who plays dirty games with her daughter. JSM: But also as a protective mother of the previous dream . . . DM: . . . oh yes. JSM: So then I went back to the dream of the church . . . DM: . . . right, right . . . JSM: . . . of the death-watch and to her confusion about her mother’s internal spaces, the highly complicated inside of her body and their functions, suggesting that the space within which an awful threatening “negro” enters an produces many black children, many pooh-babies, the mother’s anal world full of dirty things, of sinister children . . . DM: . . . right . . . JSM: . . . that should be thrown away, but also the wonderful mother’s mind where are the beautiful dreams and her capacity to generate good thought-babies. Then I suggested that her confusion about her mother’s inner spaces seem deeply mingle with her confusion about her own inner spaces, between good and bad spaces . . . DM: . . . and her orifices, . . . JSM: . . . yes, referring to the doors and the windows . . . DM: . . . quite, quite . . . JSM: . . . and I also made a reference about her mouth which she does not seem to be sure whether it is a good entry to mother’s good milk-thoughts or a very bad entry for all the jealousy that tortures her transforming the good food into awful digestive troubles, getting nightmares if only she listens to her mother’s voice in the evening.

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 37

DM: Yes, that sort of gathering in previous material, although it’s not in this present material, you had that in previous material, you have it in her digestive troubles . . . yes . . . Right! JSM: I was surprised when she told me, in a thoughtful, focused tone: “Yes . . . all those spaces are constantly confusing me.” DM: Right, good! However, the only trouble with your summary is that it doesn’t bring things into the transference. It’s more like you are observing what she does and later comment on it. But it doesn’t really bring you into the transference; it doesn’t make a reference to her feeling that you are also a kind of mother who plays dirty games with her. It’s all out there, you see. It’s in her mind and it’s in her life, but it doesn’t bring it into the transference and the way she was experiencing her relationship with you. I would say you’re placing too much emphasis on the function of interpretation, and not enough emphasis on the fact that you are listening and thinking differently, and that the atmosphere of the consulting room has changed. How long has she been with you now? JSM: One year and one month. DM: Well, it’s still the beginning, really. But you can see that the fact of this gathering of the transference almost give the patient immediate relief in their life outside, as the infantile elements are withdrawn and begin to be brought here. But then, as soon as the anxieties begin to manifest themselves in the transference, they take it all back again to the outside life, you see. This appears in her wishing to contact her husband and have this protective figure by her side, this sort of relationship with him. That’s an instance of the transference having come in, and then fly out again because she gets anxious, because it immediately arouses this Oedipal, pre-genital Oedipal feelings of making babies with grandfather and . . . wooosh!, out it goes again, you see. JSM: I was surprised when the other day she told me, in a quite natural and serious tone: “I thought very much of that dream.” . . . Now she repeatedly tells me: “I have to remember my dreams just to bring them here” . . . DM: . . . yes; since you’re so interested in her dreams they tend to become babies now; and she brings you baby, after baby, after baby . . . JSM: Meaning what, exactly? DM: Meaning that she’s acting in the transference . . . you get the feeling that she displaces her baby-dream to you, and you’re meant mainly to admire them, and to say: “what a beautiful dream!” At this point she may not be listening much to your interpretation.

38 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

JSM: Do you think that, when she tells me: “I think a lot of my dreams, except when they are nightmares.” – do you think that this may mean that some introjective identification with mother-analyst’s thinking function, her reverie function is in its way? DM: No, I would think that it is still mainly acting in the transference. That it has the meaning of: “I see that you are really interested in dream-babies. And I have great pleasure in bringing you my nice, white, dream-babies. Occasionally, I have a black feces-baby, and then I am ashamed to bring it to you but I have to get rid of it, so I bring it to you.” Which is still a stage of toilet-training, you see . . . “I see that mummy really likes when I make a nice shaped stool in the toilet. She enjoys it and I enjoy it, and we admire it. Occasionally, I still soil myself or have diarrhea, and mummy doesn’t like it, and I’m ashamed of it, but I have to get rid of it so mummy takes it away.” That’s all still what has been enacted in the transference, this toilet relationship to the mummy. JSM: But your reading doesn’t seem to account for her being so impressed about her own dreams. She now thinks by herself . . . no longer just bringing me dream, after dream, after dream in order to get rid of them, as she so often said when they were nightmares. She now takes them seriously, as something important, and really tries to think of them and to figure out what they may mean. This, again, is acting in the transference? DM: Well, I mean, to take an interest in it as a concrete object, and to say about a baby: “Oh, yes, it has two eyes, and it has two ears and a nose . . .” – that isn’t the same as taking an interest in the meaning of the baby, in what the baby is experiencing, what the baby is thinking, what the baby is feeling. Her dreams are very concrete objects, and she is very gratified that you are interested in them, and she would like to understand what it is that you find so interesting in them. I mean, she begins to be interested in what is it that you find so interesting in them. JSM: I have not recently seen any evidence of projective identification in her material except in the dream of the church. DM: Yes; the dream of the church is clearly a projective identification dream, because, first of all, it presents you with an object, the church, and she presents you with the problem of how she got into this object. There is also a representation of the father’s penis coming in there as the dead body, and there is an ending of the other dream which we don’t know about. That is clearly a projective identificatory dream. Now, it hasn’t yet taken on its claustrophobic significance because we don’t yet know about the stiffness of everything there; it hasn’t yet become persecutory nor, on the other hand, has it become satanic and exciting, and so on . . . So, it’s certainly a projective identification dream in its form, in its composition, you might say, but it hasn’t yet come through in its mental

Dreams as babies brought to the analyst 39

manifestations. Neither the identification nor the claustrophobia, they’re both incipient in that dream. And, the reasons that they are not more clear is, first of all, that we don’t know the ending; and, second of all, that we don’t know, in the previous dream, the content of the video. JSM: And this is what you meant by dream-life, rather than just individual dreams, as a privileged source for reading the evolution of the gathering of the transference, bringing several dreams as if they were pieces in a complex narrative pointing some times to this direction, some times to another, but very gradually moving toward a readable direction. DM: Yes . . . quite. Those two factors we don’t yet know about will be filled in, as the dreams develop, but it’s just in the process of developing. JSM: And yet, I cannot explain to myself which parts of herself have been split and projected into her mother; into this threatening church . . . the concrete link between the projection and the identification with what is projected, how does it concretely appear in her dream? DM: Well, first of all, in that dream, you don’t know what infantile part has gone in. You get this later dream about this “sinister child” . . . Now, that begins to give you an indication of what is the part that goes into the projective identification. It probably is a sinister part, that has perverse and satanic phantasies, and produces shit-babies. But that is as far as it got so far, you have to wait for it to develop; analysis goes at its own pace . . . But, actually, it is going along really very well now, but it’s just beginning to gather momentum, and you need to pay more attention to her behavior with you, and the acting in the transference that is going on about these dream-babies that she brings you, and whether they’re good white babies or black shit babies, you see. JSM: We still often see people associating projective identification with the process of attributing qualities to a person or a thing . . . DM: Well, drop the word “attribute.” That’s Freudian. To attribute to an object qualities of yourself is the Freudian concept of projection. JSM: As soon as I discovered Melanie Klein I didn’t want to study Freud anymore! (laughter) DM: Yes, but it’s all built on the foundation of Freud, of course. He’s terribly important. And not only in his writings but in him as a person. I mean, the person who comes through in his writings is probably more authentic than the person who comes through in biographies . . . I mean, even a little thing like the notes to “The Rat Man,” they show him as a person . . . well, the dream-book and the

40 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst

bits of this book that are about his own dreams show him as a person . . . show you all the anxieties about being a psychoanalyst . . . it’s really marvelous . . . it’s a real instruction about the counter-transference problems of the analyst. I tell you . . . I discovered Melanie Klein as a medical student. I went to medical school because I wanted to be a psychoanalyst, and when I was a medical student I did an elective honor course in a hospital, working with Dr. Loretta Bender, who was the first person to describe schizophrenia in childhood. She gave me Melanie Klein to read, and it absolutely . . . [INAUDIBLE] But fortunately, I had to have a Freudian training in the States before I could ever come here to work with Melanie Klein. So, I was very fortunate to have both a Freudian training and a Kleinian training. I do know how important Freud is . . . Of course, it made me a kind of renegade in Freudian circles, always talking about Melanie Klein and how it was linked with Freud, and so on. So, when I wanted to come to England to study with Melanie Klein, they told me at the Chicago Institute: “Well . . . go there and study, but we won’t take you back.” . . . (laughter!) . . . JSM: “We won’t take you back”?! . . . Because of Melanie Klein?! DM: . . . we won’t take you back . . . (laughter!) JSM: And you never went back? DM: Well, I didn’t want to go back anyhow . . . I like this country.

CHAPTER 4 “If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past.”

Summary This chapter resumes the question of experiencing the clinical material in the transference versus experiencing it outside the transference. The question was first dealt with in the previous chapter. It is now argued that the two classical ways of responding to the clinical material crucially depends on the way the analyst experiences the transference. “The difficulty about the transference is the counter-transference. If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past. This is most people’s problem: to feel the intensity, the concrete reality of the transference. It’s a matter of a kind of humility that you can’t imagine that the patient should so be attached to you . . . you are carrying the transference of an internal figure, and it is immediate, it is concrete and it is intense, and it is attached to you.” The idea that mother’s new baby may be experienced, in the transference, as robbing the placenta from the patient while expelling her out of projective identification is discussed. Sophie is now shown to develop a strong maternal transference. However, a technical mistake disturbed the evolution of this key aspect of the transference and led to a crisis in her analysis. It was, however, the discussion of this mistake that shed a new light over the meaning of the transference. The meaning, in psychic reality, of the feeling of triumph, is now perhaps better seen at work in the transference. NB: This report ends the first year of supervision.

42 Feeling the intensity of the transference

JSM: This was the first session after summer holiday break. Sophie spent that month together with her parents and her daughter. She didn’t have nightmares, or digestive troubles, or any quarrel with anyone. “It was a paradisiacal time” – she said. During this period she decided to wear her mother’s clothes. In the week-end preceding her resuming analysis, however, she was unexpectedly besieged by nightmares again. All she can remember are fragments of two of them. In the first, she saw a flying plane, full of rescued children from Bosnia. Suddenly, the plane’s belly was opened and the children began to fall down straight to the ground. As the children touched the ground, however, she noticed that they were all dolls. In the other dream, a five-year-old black girl couldn’t stand the baby she was holding in her arms and just dropped the baby down on the ground which, however, was in fact a tram railway. In her dream, a tram came right in the direction of the baby. While dreaming, Sophie made such a jerk with her neck not to see the baby being crashed by the tram that the next morning she had to have medical assistance to redress a slightly displaced cervical vertebra. She then reported two other dreams she had the previous night. In the first, as she walked alone and quietly in a street, a woman, driving a car right in her direction, suddenly braked hard just in front of her. A man was sitting at her side in the car. The woman who was driving the car and has stopped right in front of Sophie invited into the car another man who was just passing by, while at the same time provoking Sophie scornfully. In the second dream of the previous night the same woman pressured still more men into the car in an increasingly scornful and defying mood. In this last dream Sophie thought: “. . . but she wants all the men in the world all for herself . . . !” – and felt terribly deserted and fragile. She then realized that, in her last dream, the woman driving the car was, in reality, a secret lover of one of Sophie’s former lovers, in a time during which Sophie was still engaged with him. In her associations, she emphasized the betraying attitude of that woman, of her lover’s secret lover, but not of her lover himself toward her. I suggested that “the moment you come out of your mother’s protection,” referring to her delightful stay with her parents in August . . . DM: . . . wearing her mother’s clothes. JSM: Yes, in a state of projective identification . . . DM: . . . yes. So you get a picture of how it works, really. This woman is in a state of projective identification inside the car, inviting all these penises to get in. And you can get a picture of the sort of complacency with which Sophie lived the summer holiday, enjoying all these penises. Every time the father had intercourse with the mother, it was Sophie, inside the mother, wearing her clothes, enjoying his penis.

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JSM: . . . thus betraying the mother, just like the secret lover in her dream. DM: Yes. JSM: She now seems to confirm what you said, I think. For she recalled her enormous excitement in treating her mother as scornfully as she could, “still much, much worse than my lover’s lover has treated me in my dream.” DM: Quite . . . So while she is in mother’s clothes, she is enjoying father’s penis. The father is really coming into mother with his penis in order to enjoy Sophie secretly. She is father’s secret lover, as you said . . . it’s an important picture of being in projective identification with her mother’s vaginal space, feeling that all men are in love with her and desire her . . . complacency, you see. JSM: This being the true nature of her feeling protected, as she put it; feeling protected by triumph over her mother; of the “paradisiacal period.” DM: Yes. The moment, however, mother has a baby, the whole thing is shattered. JSM: Yes, yes! For then, suddenly, her complacency, her feeling it “paradisiacal,” explodes against concrete reality . . . DM: . . . and she has to drop the new baby on the rails of a coming train, and to turn the real babies into puppets. JSM: All the babies I’ve made during holidays with the prostitute sticking out her threatening nails at her were suddenly reduced to puppets, phony, and lifeless. DM: Yes. Though she is the youngest of her siblings, she is not the youngest with you, you see. During the summer holiday you might have had a new baby – a new patient. So the prospect of coming back to you is equivalent to meeting you with a new baby; she is going to come to you and some other patient whom she has never seen before is going to come before her, or after her, and shatters the phantasy that all through the summer she has been enjoying your penis secretly. JSM: I see . . . thus feeding her triumph over my wife. DM: . . . scornfully; enjoying being scornful, yes . . . quite. JSM: But then the five-year-old Sophie drops the baby down on the rails, jerking away from the vision of its consequences, and makes mother’s belly drop down all her new babies. All out of mother’s belly and killed!

44 Feeling the intensity of the transference

DM: Yes . . . One really has to draw this into the transference. This was her way of having dealt with summer break, wearing her mother’s clothes, in her mother’s house, secretly enjoying living inside mother’s vagina and enjoying your daddypenis, but now threatened by the whole thing to explode the moment she comes back and finds that you have a new baby patient. JSM: And here again comes the question of whether it would be better to stick to the transference or move into the actual family situation. DM: This is a matter of technique, really. Whether you interpret the family situation, with its reference to the past, or whether you interpret the transference and the way in which the family situation has been misused in the present. My way would be the latter: to focus on the transference, and to deal with her behavior at home as an acting out . . . not as a reappearance of her family relationships, which have a reference to the analysis, but the other way round. You may interpret the family first and the analysis second. That gives the impression that she is still rooted in her family, and the analysis gets some of the backwash of these relationships, instead of focusing on the transference and seeing that her family gets the backwash of it. JSM: So, you would once again stick to the transference for it is in the transference where the truth of the emotional conflicts are now really experienced? DM: Yes. JSM: Not only in the light of what you actually experience it in the present but also in the way you believe the patient is concretely experiencing her relationship with you, hour after hour. DM: Yes. The difficulty about the transference is the counter-transference. If you don’t see and feel the intensity of the transference, and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past. This is most people’s problem; to feel the intensity, the concrete reality of the transference. It’s a matter of a kind of humility that you can’t imagine that the patient should so be attached to you. JSM: I wonder whether shunning the emotional impact of the transference is not tainted with cowardice. DM: “Who am I for her to love so passionately?”1 And the answer is that you are carrying the transference of an internal figure, you see . . . of an internal figure . . . and it is immediate, it is concrete, and it is intense, and it is attached to you; and what is necessary for you is to be able to carry it. When you interpret outside the

Feeling the intensity of the transference 45

transference you do shift some of the transference away from yourself to the parents in the present. JSM: This being why you said the other day that many patients feel deceived by it; many patients feel deceived and quite disappointed by this way of doing things in the consulting-room . . . DM: . . . yes. By taking the material outside the transference you leave the patient feeling a little bit rebuffed and rejected, that you don’t accept the intensity of their feelings and the immediacy and concreteness of their desires and expectations. But until you feel it, you can’t do it. Of course, the most striking example is for a man to carry the maternal transference. It’s such a terrific difficulty for male therapists to experience the concreteness and intensity of the maternal transference. JSM: You have also pointed out, in the previous session, that she was clearly making both a very good maternal and paternal transference at the moment . . . DM: . . . oh yes! “Good” in the sense of intense. JSM: Later in the session she told me: “My parents are cradling me. I feel a baby when I’m together with them at their home. I have the feeling of being their child. I don’t really think that I would be able to leave my parents’ home.” DM: Yes . . . “being in the cradle” is again a way of living in projective identification, you see . . . JSM: The following session she arrived ten minutes late, entered my apartment very excited and anxious, talking all the time as she went along the corridor, and then said: “Yesterday when I was just about to leave the university someone told me that there has been a robbery at the press” (where an important book she herself was the editor and in more than one way responsible for, was in the process of being printed). She has left the MSS there and hasn’t made any copies of them. When she heard this she was just invaded by all sorts of persecutory phantasies, even before having asked any question about the real situation – the details of the robbery, what exactly happened; checking what had, in fact, disappeared, and so on. She already knew that she was guilty of everything, whatever it might have happened; that this was going to be the end of her career as a scholar; that she would never ever be forgiven; that the thieves robbed the press only to steal the MSS she was responsible for; that the typographers, who have always been very kind to her, had just plotted against her, and so on. DM: Meaning: there is a new baby stealing her position in the family, you see; the concreteness and the intensity and the immediacy of the transference; and I would

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at this point go back to the baby that she was holding the moment the tram was about to pass. JSM: Oh yes! . . . When she dropped the baby the moment the tram was just about flashing through! Then she said: “Only when I approached your consultingroom did I begin to calm down, thinking ‘What part of myself have I put in all this? I’m not sure even that there has been a robbery at all, and even if there has been one, why should the thieves have stolen precisely my papers?’” DM: The answer is: “Because you think that this new baby of mine is going to be so fascinating and so loveable that it will take away from you all my interest in you and all my affection for you.” Now, this again is concrete, because it’s quite geographical, you see. The new baby is really going to take her place inside the mother and within her family, and therefore occupy this space and push her out of projective identification. All this is very concretely experienced in the transference. JSM: But the moment she gets to my consulting-room, she feels reassured that I’m there with her so she calmed down . . . DM: . . . she calmed down because she doesn’t see any new baby . . . JSM: And yet, she added: “. . . and then I felt completely deserted and abandoned.” DM: . . . and I would interpret to her: “The only thing that you are in danger of is of having to live outside your mother’s body, and having to realize that when mummy and daddy are together you are not there.” JSM: But this time you would not word it in the transference, you would suddenly move it out into the family situation. DM: Oh yes, in the transference, yes . . . I would have told her that this is a revelation that you have other patients, and you might even have a new patient right there. And the realization that when another patient is with you she is not there, and when you are with your wife she also is not there. JSM: . . . so here comes again the dropping of the baby; of every baby who is not herself . . . DM: . . . yes . . . JSM: . . . and the unbearable evidence of the betrayal . . . DM: . . . otherwise she is always in your mind, you see, you’re always thinking of her, no matter what you’re doing; if you’re analyzing other patients, you’re

Feeling the intensity of the transference 47

really thinking of her; if you’re making love to your wife, you’re really thinking of her – she is always there, dominating your mind. JSM: Yes, yes; concretely. Then she told me that while she was still dominated by her anxiety, she thought: “I knew that I couldn’t possibly trust anyone; that everybody has always plotted against me, I knew it! I felt completely deserted and abandoned.” DM: Yes, there is a plot, you see. There is not only the plot to get a new baby, but that this new baby would steal the placenta, the inside of the mother’s breast, whatever, and push her out of projective identification. And she said to her father: “I don’t know how I can leave home. If you want me out, you have to push me out. I can’t really leave on my own accord.” Now, that of course admits that it is not a claustrum she is condemned to, that there is a way out, but she cannot willingly take it. She would have to be expelled. JSM: And it’s interesting because she says it to her father, not to her mother, as if saying, “stop coming into me, otherwise I can’t leave.” DM: Quite, quite . . . JSM: Then she said: “I always thought, and to a certain extent I still think today, that it would be quite just for my mother to pay for all she has done to me.” Her lover’s secret lover again. DM: . . . while mother keeps waiting for her to grow and develop and to relinquish this phantasy that she is having daddy’s penis all the time; that being in analysis means being inside mummy; and that you are daddy’s penis, and she is having you, dominating your life, so that you never think of anybody but Sophie. JSM: Triumph . . . A deep hatred. DM: Triumph, yes. Well, the idea of a deep hatred, I think that it is probably not correct, really. I mean, she has illustrated for you, in this dream of the woman in the car, that her scorn for her mother was a sense of triumph over her mother, not hatred for her . . . it was triumph. Because, you see, the concrete experience was that daddy really was her lover, not mummy’s lover. In this state of projective identification she herself was the irresistible sexual object; daddy’s secret aim was really to have intercourse with her. That’s what she concretely experienced was in his mind; triumph over her mother, yes. And I think that’s important to interpret to her. JSM: The next session she arrived five minutes before the end of her time. She was again excited even though, this time, she seemed much relieved. She told me that nothing serious really happened about the robbery – “Why have I possibly

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been caught in such an anxiety?” – she asked. She was really both surprised and upset with her fragility, and added: “At any moment everything can collapse into a ruin with me . . . If I hadn’t come today, even for five minutes, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.” DM: Anyhow, she said that even five minutes is better than nothing. So, why did she come late, do you have any idea? What was the ostensible reason, and what was the transferential meaning of her coming late? JSM: The transferential meaning, I think, will appear much later . . . DM: My guess is that she came that late in order to find out if you have started with your new patient early in her time; to catch you at it, giving away her time to your new patient, to your new baby. JSM: Yes, the robbery was not serious, she said, as if saying: “I feel reassured, but nevertheless let’s check it . . .” DM: Quite. JSM: “At any moment everything can collapse . . .” DM: Should the next patient have arrived, you might feel very tempted to start this session a bit earlier and she would have trapped you. That would be my guess, anyway. JSM: I had to make a change in her schedule replacing her Monday hour with an hour on Tuesday. The next session she was in such an excitement about her daughter starting her new academic year at a new school – “It is as though it was me who was going to school again! I’m much more excited than her! I already read all her books.” The previous evening she had a meeting at her daughter’s school in which a group of mothers protested against several things related with the way the school was ruled. The complaints directly aimed at the (woman) director of the school who was attending the meeting – “I was so excited with that protest! I could never expect to see so many women protesting against the director! I was so excited that last night I couldn’t sleep a second!” DM: How nice to have so many “sisters” protesting against mummy-analyst telling her that she has no right to change her schedule without her permission to do so, without first asking her whether she would agree, without asking her permission to have a new baby . . . JSM: Well, I did ask her whether she could accommodate this slight change in her schedule.

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DM: What did she say? JSM: This was the beginning of a rather tricky situation which ended up in the question whether I have actually imposed on her this change – which I do not think I have – though the situation was – and still remains today – quite unclear. DM: You may of course have to impose a change in her schedule but it’s very important, in terms of being straightforward with your patients, whether you asked them to do you a favor for your convenience or you have to impose something on them because you have no choice. Both are ok. But it is very important to be straightforward. JSM: I did ask her whether this change was inconvenient for her. Now, although she said “no, there isn’t any inconvenience,” the music of her voice did sound to me: “and yet I feel very reluctant about saying ok,” though without any palpable reason to say so. DM: So you have imposed it on her. JSM: I didn’t impose anything on her, and yet I have the clear feeling that she suffered my convenience as a pressure. DM: Of course! JSM: I did ask her about facts, not about feelings. Whether she feels reluctant or not was not in my question and not on the table although it was in her answer. I simply decided to ignore her unuttered innuendo. If there would be any inconvenience for her, say so. There is a reluctance, not an inconvenience. DM: Well, we have to watch for the consequences. What I’m suggesting is that she is in the process of being pushed out of projective identification, and you now asked her to do you a favor and more or less grudgingly she has agreed to. JSM: Yes. This is what I think has happened. DM: But let’s see what happened. I mean, a patient refuses to leave the room at the end of a session. What do you do about it? JSM: Did that already happen to you? DM: Oh yes! . . . What do you do about it? Well, I had a patient that at the end of every session refused to leave the room. She threw things about, stamped, broke the window, smashed the door, and so on, and refused to leave. . . . And I had to say to her: “you have three minutes to leave, before the next patient arrives. If you stay longer than that, that is the finish of your analysis with me. So out

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she went! But for a year this went on! . . . But she’s now one of my dearest friends . . . (smiles sweetly) JSM: Really amazing! . . . DM: She was terrible, really . . . These are all problems of the setting, you see. So let’s see what happened. JSM: So I suggested that her excitement in watching her mother-director being crashed right there in front of her by the choir of all her siblings suggests how active is your hatred against mother-analyst . . . DM: . . . you see, again, I wouldn’t have taken of the hatred as much as her replacing the triumph of her projective identification – getting all the penises from daddy – for a new kind of triumph, of the children protesting against mother, and forcing mother to back down . . . Triumphant, not hatred. JSM: Oh yes . . . I actually missed the differentiation, yes. Besides, I think I just slip away from the transference. Something happened with me and it may have to do with the unclarity about this change of schedule. DM: Let’s see what happens. JSM: She then just burst suddenly in a furious contempt about her father – “he is incapable of being a father; incapable of being a husband; incapable of being a mother; incapable of being my father!” This burst of fury being of course launched at me for my having imposed a change on her schedule without her permission or . . . DM: . . . yes, there you are. JSM: Yes . . . now I see it . . . Later in the session she told me about her fascination for her mother’s “immense energy . . . I’m nothing when compared with her.” As I suggested that her fascination for her mother seems to conceal her envy of her, she made a slip of tongue: “Yes . . .” – she said in a reflective tone – “I have much more energy than her.” DM: Hum-hum . . . JSM: Why do you say: “Hum-hum”? DM: Because this is an important realization. For a child, a little girl, to compare herself with mummy and realize: “how daddy desire me rather than her . . . What a magnificent woman she is, and I’m this little girl . . . It’s ridiculous to think that

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he is overpowered with desire in such a way that he cannot really desire his wife or any other person.” So you can see that the problem in the transference is now centered around the change of the schedule; daddy has intruded himself into the nursery and imposed on the baby this sacrifice by taking mummy away on Mondays saying to mummy: “oh, never mind, you can have her on Tuesday,” and take her away. Mummy yielded to him because of the expectation of getting pleasure, and they together are these “lovely” pleasure-loving parents, you see. This is the accusation against you; a “lovely” pleasure-loving combined object. JSM: . . . and all this burst of hatred and contempt at her father . . . DM: . . . that’s again all transference, you see, just transference. JSM: And when she then told me that she had enlisted her ex-husband either as her mother or her father, and that by the end of their marriage there was really no differentiation between the three of them, getting both figures and functions confused . . . DM: . . . the big word is confusion . . . she easily gets confused in all sorts of ways, confused about the geography of her life, in and out of projective identification, confused between infantile and adult, confused about good and bad . . . she gets confused, you see, and acts it out . . . JSM: . . . this being largely because I had not held her firmly in the transference, you think? DM: Yes; you must hold her in the transference and hold yourself in the countertransference . . . the difficulty of the transference being the difficulty of the counter-transference. So you get the point when something happens in the transference and you get a lot of evidence of the patient acting out, the whole thing has to be drawn tightly back into the transference, and you should try to locate what really happened. Sometimes you really don’t know what’s happening . . . oh! was it that you might have stopped the previous session two minutes earlier and you didn’t notice? or is it that the patient met another patient in her way to the consulting-room? What happened? . . . you really don’t know what happened but you suddenly have an explosion of acting out! oh . . . is it this? . . . is it that? . . . no, it’s a little bit earlier for Christmas holidays; it doesn’t seem to be Christmas material . . . Well, what happened, then? . . . no . . . it doesn’t feel that way; no . . . she’s missing sessions; she’s late; she stays at late hours at the press to be admired by all these men there . . . Something has happened . . . what was it? . . . And if you can’t locate what happened, you may summarize the material and say to the patient: look, this . . . this . . . this . . . this; things have escaped from the analysis, it has been acted all around; have you any idea what has happened? It looks as if I had offended you

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in some way . . . or arouse your distrust of me in some way . . . do you have any idea? And if the patient says “no . . . I’ve no idea,” you say: “look, we are working without dreams for two weeks now; it’s very important to try to remember your dreams otherwise we may not be able to locate what happened,” you see. You have to investigate it . . . In this case we can locate the source of all this turbulence and instability, and the trouble was that you changed her time; not just you changed her time, but you asked her to do you a favor and then you pressured her to do it, you see . . . I would have told her, “look, something has disrupted the contact with me . . . you’ve just come out from your mother’s body and made contact with me as a mother, and then it got lost . . . Something must have happened . . . do you have any idea? . . .” you see, so that you can hold the thread again.

Note 1. Meltzer refers to a line in Keats’ letter to Leigh Hunt, dated 10 May 1817 (cf. Keats, 1990, p. 10).

CHAPTER 5 “When she lowers the passion, she lowers the value of everything, and then abandonment is so much easier”

Summary A technical mistake played a key role in precipitating the analysis of Sophie into a crisis. This crisis lasted for several months. In the course of this period, however, new important material emerged. While discussing it, Meltzer pointed out that, as the new born leaves the placenta behind, she is driven to attach herself to the breast as an alternative object of transference. This shift may however be traumatic for the newborn. Some of the uninvited consequences of this shift may at any moment surface in the session of both child- and adult analysis. A concrete instance of this disturbing experience is shown operating in the transference in this chapter. The struggle to integrate the combined object showed new developments. New material brings further evidence of how the mind seems to work at partobject level. Melanie Klein and the Kleinians have made of envy the core of pathology. This concept, together with “the terrible concept of ‘negative therapeutic reaction’” are here questioned. The key question of the music of the voice of both the analysand and the analyst, and in particular, the importance of “. . . interpreting in a tone of voice of sharing your thinking with her rather than interpreting to her” is emphasized.

JSM: On further evidence of her state of confusion I suggested that something serious must have happened – which however she immediately denied. I suggested that much of her upset was perhaps due to her being very scared should she meet

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a new patient taking up her place in my consulting-room on her returning from holidays, and that her fears were later painfully confirmed when I made a change in her schedule. “Ahhhh! . . . indeeeeed!! . . .” – she said – “As soon as I came back from holidays you changed my hours!” – “What did happen” – I said – “was that three weeks after you had returned from your holidays I asked you to replace your Monday hour by an hour in Tuesday. But of course what is important is that you felt this change as a confirmation of what you feared most: that, behind your back, and without your permission, mother has a new baby, implying that I just gave my new baby your hour, that is, I suddenly gave my new baby all my attention and all my interest, the new baby being much more fascinating than you. Furthermore, I was very unclear about that change . . .” – “Ah! . . . Yeeees! . . . I felt terrible about that too! I accepted the former schedule because I trusted you. But now I lost all my confidence in you.” She then told me that she had a long dispute with the director of the school of her daughter. The core of this dispute turned on the way geography is taught there. Soon afterward, however, she herself felt this quarrel pointless. In the session she was furious with the director and insulted her. “She really doesn’t understand anything at all! She treats my daughter just like a number! . . . she doesn’t even know who she is! She almost put me out. But then, I felt stupid arguing with her.” Then she had lunch with her parents and bitterly complained about the director of the school, but they didn’t take her seriously. “My father gave me a special wine but I had terrible digestive pains and even vomited the lunch. This week-end I gnawed my finger nails until I made wounds in my fingers.” I suggested that the argument she had with the director of the school seemed to entirely aim at me: “mother really doesn’t understand anything at all!!”. “Then” – I went on – “you asked your parents to protect you, complaining about having been betrayed and neglected by mother-analyst. She got another baby! How could she?!?! without my permission?!, and you expected them to feed you, to supply your inside with what you felt I had deeply deprived you of, that is, daddy’s penis. And you may have been divided between your need to be sheltered by them and to feel soothed by your father’s penis in the form of the special wine he has so dearly taught you to appreciate, though you seem to have taken it as yet another highly seductive move, confirming you, once again, as his only true lover. But then you seem to have deeply rejected it, your rejection taking the form of having colics and even vomiting the lunch.” DM: That’s all quite correct, really. That she, in her resentment at feeling deprived by mother – by the breast, really – this is all really at part object level . . . That she then re-invokes this confusion between nipple and penis, and the result is that she had these digestive troubles. Again, splitting the combined object as you now stand for, trying to turn the nipple against the breast, to split them, because when they are together she is having pre-genital Oedipal resentment, that they don’t understand anything about the suffering of the baby about their being together.

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This is really a rage at the breast and nipple as a combined object. In a sense, it’s a rage against its self-sufficiency, and that it doesn’t establish with the baby a mutual dependence. JSM: And it seemed very interesting that her dispute was about the way geography has been taught . . . for my holidays and my changing her schedule unclearly drove her back into geographic confusion.1 DM: Yes . . . The baby is fully dependent, and the breast and nipple are independent because they have one another. Pre-genital Oedipus complex, really. An attempt to split them, and if she succeeds in splitting them, each of them is felt to be directed toward the baby, and the baby becomes the centre. As soon as they are together, the baby is on the periphery, away from the other children. So, although it looks as if it’s mainly directed at jealousy of the other children, underneath that jealousy there is really the feeling of dependence on the combined object, and the feeling of the helplessness of this dependence. It’s important to realize that this jealousy is really a kind of delusional jealousy of the inside babies. Envy, you see . . . the trouble with envy as a concept is that it attributes too much imagination to the baby, of the richness, and pleasure, and so on of this combined object . . . That’s a much later development, already of the genital Oedipus complex. The pre-genital Oedipus complex doesn’t exist fed by such a rich imagination; it works with a rather simple oscillation between dependence and independence, wanting a mutual dependence; for this kind of mutual feeding of one another, mutual cleansing of one another, a perpetual mobile of mutual dependence. To be reduced to being dependent on the object makes the baby feeling too insecure . . . it’s the insecurity, you see . . . I mean, historically, at the time when Mrs. Klein wrote Envy and Gratitude, everybody was smitten by it, and for two or three years after that, every paper that came out of the Klein group was “envy,” “envy,” “envy” . . . and then, there gradually emerged this terrible concept of the “negative therapeutic reaction.” Everything that was not therapeutically responsive in the patient was attributed to envy of the therapist’s creativity! (laughter!) Suddenly, the therapist never made a mistake, never was inadequate . . . he had this “wonderful” concept of “negative therapeutic reaction” to shelter him from his responsibility (laughter!). And then, that was begun to be replaced by the appreciation of problems of the countertransference, and that the analyst wasn’t so marvelously creative, after all . . . JSM: The next session she dreamed that she was having lunch with an uncle of her and his wife. Her uncle died two years ago. Sophie always loved him dearly, but always hated her aunt. In her dream she deeply enjoyed having such a quiet lunch with them and, in the session, she was surprised how she could stand so well the presence of her aunt. The lunch took place in a small town where, in her adolescence, she spent wonderful times with both. The concrete reality of the transference impressed me once again.

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DM: Yes . . . she had recovered from this attempt to split breast and nipple . . . JSM: . . . mother-analyst-from-the-new-baby. So back again to the combined object. DM: Yes. Now, the thing about the dream is that it also is an attempt to moderate the intensity of her attachment to you by moving it from parents to aunt and uncle . . . She tried to keep it at a slightly lower level of passion, to moderate rather than modify, you see. It’s an important difference; it would be Bion’s way of describing it. The defences which modulate the mental pain are easily abandoned; defences which modify the structure of the situation are not so easy to change. This is back to modifying of the mental pain in a way that diminishes the intensity of the transference without altering its qualities. JSM: Very interesting! You’ll see! The next session she didn’t come and didn’t say anything. The following session, however, she told me that the session she missed was her birthday. – “I was just about to come but I didn’t want to spend the whole day in the traffic.” – she said, in a tone of voice as if throwing some heavy, hurting object at me. The question of the extent to which this change may or may not increase the amount of time she has now to take driving to my place was examined in detail by Meltzer. I’m skipping this scrutiny. The change took her, in fact, about five minutes. DM: So her I didn’t want to spend the whole day in the traffic was a big exaggeration ... JSM: . . . a huge exaggeration, yes. DM: . . . probably referring to that change of time . . . JSM: . . . oh certainly referring to my changing her schedule; an expression of her resentment . . . DM: So she might have felt it was inconsiderate of you . . . JSM: Well, I thought that she was saying to me: “I’m still very much confused about who is the good mother-analyst and who is the bad mother-analyst who is very inconsiderate when she leaves me alone and goes away with daddy during holidays making a new baby whom you have evidently given my hour to . . .”. She was hurling her heavy, enraged voice at me as if punishing me for my betrayal. DM: But it also has a reference to her birthday because it does seem that all of this trouble started at her birth, with having to make a transfer from the placenta to the breast, and feeling that the breast is not like the placenta. The placenta is

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always there, always supplying, constantly giving her all the oxygen, all the food, taking away all the waste products. I mean, physiologically, the breast doesn’t work as perfectly as the placenta. With the breast, the baby has to wait. So it has a reference to birth and to her grievance [about the shift from one object of transference to the other]. And of course, her way when she feels her grievance is always to punish, punish, punish . . . But it is true that it is also what she can, with some reason, feel that has been inconsiderate, because you didn’t discuss with her what this change of time costs her in reality. In reality, it costs her some few minutes more in the traffic. That becomes all day. JSM: “Last Friday I met one of my nieces. She was carrying a baby in her arms and yet was already pregnant. I enjoyed very much seeing her and she was really very kind to me. That night I dreamed of her. In my dream she was vomiting her baby away in such an unstanchable flow of water until my niece herself sank into that mass of water, so that both the baby and the mother finally disappeared. She aborted her baby through her mouth.” DM: It was only a few days ago that she got colic and vomited after lunch. JSM: A week, yes. – “Your dream seems to show how painfully it has been for you to experience losing your baby – of seeing all the rescued children I have made during holidays being just dropped out from my belly [referring, of course, to her dream of the plain with rescued children from Bosnia]; of watching five-year-old black Sophie being miscarried out of mother-analyst’s interest just dropped down on the rails just like the baby you were holding in your arms in the exact moment the tram was just flashing through, mother having withdrawn from you all her attention and interest re-directing it to that more beautiful baby. So you may have had a fright about watching the baby-Sophie who is just being gradually born in your analysis now being dropped, actually vomited in the form of water until you yourself too disappeared from my thoughts and love and concern.” DM: Right. Now, you haven’t referred to her vomiting of the previous week or to her missing the session? JSM: No, I didn’t. DM: Because that is certainly what is referred to here. As having aborted that session, and in that way, feeling that she abandoned the baby part of herself, which is still not clearly differentiated from her daughter or other babies that she might have. The ease with which she abandons her baby, you see, the ease with which she loses valuable things, is also related to lowering the value of them, as she did with aunt and uncle instead of paternal and maternal figures. When she lowers the passion, she lowers the value of everything, and then abandonment is so much

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easier – to abandon this, to abandon that, if their value has been brought down. So, I think that is very important to bring out how it comes about that she is able to lower the value of the analysis, and then she can just vomit it out, lose the session, lose the babies. JSM: So her dream is more about lowering the passion and of course the value of important things, thus easing the pain of losses and the awareness of their importance rather than slaughtering the babies she fears she was going to meet in my consultingroom when she returns from holidays? DM: At this point I think it is more about losing valuable things, yes. JSM: “Last night it was awful. I suddenly woke up totally convinced that I was pregnant! I couldn’t sleep for hours! I studied an entire book on female anatomy trying to understand whether I was really pregnant, whether I had forgotten the symptoms of pregnancy! I thought: now I’m really mad . . . I watched myself in the mirror time and again and began to perceive a slight volume in my belly! Next morning, however, when I realized that I wasn’t pregnant at all, I felt very sad.” DM: This is quite clearly not an adult woman worried about being pregnant but a little girl worried about mother being pregnant, studying mother’s outline, watching mother’s habits . . . JSM: Therefore entirely forgetting about the symptoms of pregnancy that she herself had of course gone through . . . DM: . . . quite. So, again, it is this combined object which also means the danger of mummy having new babies, and therefore, once again, back to your changing her schedule. But it also means that if the objects, once coming together, it’s allowed to be precious, then it means that they also have the power to make new babies. If there’s an aunt and uncle, and their passion is brought down, well, you see, they’re not going to be this creative couple . . . they’re just a nice couple, content to look after the baby that they already have, a very comfy couple. She is worried about you, being this pregnant couple, this creative couple that can make babies. JSM: In what way exactly? DM: Well, it comes after you have made quite a long, and a very good, integrated interpretation, pulling things together, which quite impressed her; I mean, it’s really an excellent interpretation which brings together the recent material, and she’s very impressed . . . she was silent for a while, and instead of saying to you, [now mimicking the voice of an inquisitive, puzzled little girl]: “Hey! . . . who do you have intercourse with these days? . . . you sound very pregnant . . .”. Instead

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of asking you this she brings forward this other material – she herself is pregnant!, you see. JSM: . . . doing like mummy . . . – “Furthermore” – I continued – “you arrived exactly at the same time as another (woman) patient” [who came at a wrong hour. So when I opened the door of my apartment to Sophie they were both outside. Sophie, however, was positively shrunk at the “remotest” corner of the very small hall between the lift and the outside door, behind the other analysand, as if hidden behind her] . . . DM: Let’s see what happened . . . it’s really very interesting . . . JSM: “Oh, yes! . . .” – she said – “I felt terribly! It took me quite a long time to realize that she was not your wife.” And yet, it was immediately clear that the other woman was a patient. Besides, I told the other patient that I was very sorry but she was wrong . . . DM: . . . right in front of Sophie? JSM: Yes, right there, in the hall of my apartment; in this odd situation I was unable to find any less cumbersome way of doing things – “It would seem” – I still suggested – “that, all in a sudden, you saw your painful suspicions totally confirmed, that I really have deceived you with my wife, this being why I have changed your schedule and cancelled the other sessions, and I really had new babies much more fascinating than you, whom you have slaughtered by suddenly opening up, in the air, my wife’s belly dropping them all down to the ground. Besides, you have also opened your arms and deliberately dropped down, on the rails, the very moment the tram was just dashing by, this baby whom you, as a little black ashamed guilty girl, had stolen from me and daddy . . .” – “. . . and I stayed behind her, yes . . .” – “. . . shrinking in the corner, hiding right before the catastrophe you feared has happened but have not yet seen the evidence of . . . Now you saw it, right in front of your eyes.” – “Oh yes! It has always been like that in my life . . . I always let other people get ahead of me.” – “It seems that you may have shrunk, terrified, every time you suspected your mother might be pregnant again.” ... DM: . . . quite . . . yes. But again, you see, that pushes it into the past. There’s a way of stating it in the present, in the transference, which also relates to the past. You might have said: “. . . that you experienced me as a mother who was already pregnant with another baby.” I mean, it has clearly a reference to the past, but to keep it in the transference. JSM: This time, however, by having worded it in the past, it seems to have yielded new and surprisingly important material. For the moment she heard this,

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she quite suddenly stopped speaking, held her breath as if she has had a real shock of some kind. The atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. She remained silent for quite a long while as if she was again holding her breath. Then she said, in a very slow, thoughtful, heavy tone: “I could . . . never . . . ever . . . thought . . . of . . . that . . . In fact, my mother suffered several miscarriages after having me . . .” – and at this point, slightly changing the tone of her voice again, she added, now in a rather sombre key: “My mother ought to have more children . . . my parents wished to have another baby, I think, but it didn’t work . . . It was difficult for her to carry her pregnancies to the end.” DM: So now she makes it clear that she experiences that situation as if she had aborted that baby. JSM: Yes, yes! So here is the baby she was actually frightened that I might have had during holidays, “confirmed” by the equivocal changing of her schedule, and now over-confirmed by this other analysand popping up . . . DM: . . . as if she had, in some sense, forced you to abort the baby by making you realise that you had got pregnant at the wrong time. JSM: . . . this was exactly what I told her. But every time for me to get pregnant would be the wrong time for her . . . DM: . . . before she gave you permission, or before she was ready to receive a new baby; and the outcome of that situation which I think is partly because you spoke with the other patient in front of her. JSM: Why? DM: Because it was as if she had forced you, from her hiding place in the corner of the outside hall, to abort that baby. So, there is an air of triumph and of contempt for you, as the mother who allows her baby to be aborted to satisfy this dangerous creature, as it were. She feels that she is dangerous. JSM: Dangerous, yes . . . and triumphant being so dangerous! “So every time you suspected your mother to be pregnant again” – I still went on – “you probably felt it as a catastrophe because you seem to have suddenly realized that neither your mother’s thoughts and attention nor your father’s penis were conceived to serve you alone any more, and this seems why you felt so deeply deserted and betrayed by everyone, as you put it right in the beginning of your analysis (cf. Chapter 1), and now about my “deceitful” changing of your schedule: you felt deceived by me both as a mother, not only because I did get a new babypatient much more fascinating than you, but also because I would rather enjoy being with your father instead of standing any further your nightmares and furies. Furthermore, I also seem to have deceived you as daddy in yet another sense: my

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wife always comes ahead of you. So you felt thrown to the remotest corner of the world, as in the little entrance hall, ‘always behind other people,’ as you put it, knowing that you have really been deprived of everything you had.” – “I can’t really have a lasting love relationship with anyone because who would ever bear my nightmares and my colic.” DM: Now, you see . . . These are all really excellent interpretations in their content, because you are pulling things together, and holding things together very firmly, but, you see, to make a long interpretation like that, which has so much content to it, which is so dense, really, it’s better to make it in a tone of voice of sharing your thinking with her rather than interpreting to her . . . I mean, the tone of your voice, as you read your report, is not so subtly changed, really, when you are thinking and when you introduce words like perhaps and probably and it seems to me so as to keep it tentative . . . JSM: . . . to emphasize that I do not know, and yet I feel it this way . . . DM: . . . of course. Otherwise, it can be felt very much like a judgement being handed down, and felt by the patient as very harsh and crushing. Because your interpretation is very bulky and dense; the tone of voice is technically very important . . . I mean, especially when making such a dense and really very, very good interpretation, difficult to digest. JSM: I’m worried about not having control over the tone of my voice. Sometimes I feel that I may perhaps be too assertive . . . DM: Yes, as you read it it’s really not so subtly changed and this is really important. JSM: Then she went back, in great excitement, to her phantasies of being pregnant, describing the whole scene in still greater detail, then concluding: “The following day I had a great fury.” – “Against whom?” – “Against the man who got me pregnant and then vanished . . . I want to keep my baby! He doesn’t want me to keep the baby any more, but I do want to keep him!” DM: What man is she talking about? JSM: About me, I think. DM: But who is she consciously talking about? JSM: I do not feel she is referring to any real man . . . DM: . . . hummmmm . . . it sounds more concrete than that . . . well, let’s go on and see . . . I mean, whether it’s the concreteness of the little girl, who completely

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forgets that you have to have a sexual relationship in order to get pregnant, just lost in the identification with the mother, I don’t know . . . it may be that. But, it sounds a little bit too concrete . . . JSM: I felt that she was referring to the little baby, the black five-year-old whom she was carrying in her arms though then dropped down on the rails when the tram . . . DM: . . . probably, probably, yes . . . JSM: . . . and she is trying to retrieve that baby getting this baby confused with the baby her mother had lost . . . DM: . . . yes, probably, yes . . . now reporting to you the state she had in the middle of the night, when she was in a confusional state, and looked in the mirror, and so on . . . But she says: “the next day I had this great fury,” and you said: “against whom?” Then she said: “against the man who got me pregnant and then went away . . .” JSM: It was the day after she had realised that after all she wasn’t pregnant. DM: It’s very uncertain, really . . . I think that it’s meant to leave you in a state of uncertainty, to project into you her confusion about adult and infantile . . . I certainly would have felt very confused at this point: is this a child talking or is an adult talking? But let’s go on . . . JSM: I am confused, but hope to get it clarified. C2: As I read the report I felt that she was referring to the phantasies of adolescent girls of getting pregnant just by sitting on their fathers’ “magic” chair at the table and . . . DM: . . . oh yes! yes . . . she sits on the father’s chair every time he is abroad and worries that she’s pregnant . . . yes . . . But it’s one thing to report it to you as daddy, to make you jealous, and it’s another thing to report it to you as mummy. She’s much more likely to be secretive about her sexual relationships once the maternal transference becomes strong and established. JSM: The following session she told me that she met her former lover whom she had previously described as a liar and a sado-masochist. This man, Albert, used to be involved in secret love affairs with several women at the same time. DM: Remember that when a man has the meaning of a delinquent sado-masochistic lover, any time they meet they are very likely to end up in bed . . . for years, and years, and years . . .

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JSM: Well, you will see. She told me: “Now I realize that I have used him only to cope with my loneliness.” Then she added: “When I was a little girl I use to do all sorts of dangerous things . . .” DM: . . . dangerous, you see; dangerous things . . . JSM: What you mean? DM: Dangerous pervert things . . . sado-masochism . . . warning you . . . JSM: At some point of her descriptions of the many oddities of her behaviour at home when she was three, four and five, she singled out how she could just throw herself down a steep, dangerous stairs, head-long, managing to crawl fast down step by step without ever hurting herself – “And my mother never stopped me! There was a little wooden wicket-gate both at the beginning and the end of the stairs but I always ignored them.” DM: Quite . . . the dangerous stairs, you see. The point about the transference it is that, at this moment, you are the mother who doesn’t stop her from doing “dangerous” things. And you don’t stop her because you allow her to be secretive with you. You don’t say to her: “Now, what dangerous things are you doing now? With your former lover, with your ex-husband . . . what is going on in your life that you’re not telling me about, when you say that you have to be so careful about what you say to me?” JSM: Yes! I didn’t ask her, because I felt that she was warning me: “Stop your jokes! Stop cancelling sessions! Stop going for holidays, otherwise I will blow you up!” I thought I should perhaps give her time to shelve in all this. DM: I know that you’re thinking that . . . (laughing gently). But I think that all that’s been already worked over thoroughly, so what is going on now is a shift in the situation, that you have become this combined object, at a very pre-genital level, and that she and her gang-friends have organized their pre-genital delinquent sexual band . . . JSM: Are you anticipating some kind of pervert material? DM: What is it that she’s hiding from you? Let’s see what happens. JSM: She then went on: “I was really just about not coming here today” – she began the next session, then adding: “I insulted my ex-husband and his wife with all the curses I know because they seduced Charlotte (her daughter) to go with them abroad but then they ended up in not taking her with them! But then they just sent her postcards from these places!!” – “It’s exactly how you feel I have done to you because . . . , etc.”

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DM: This is another combined object, you see. The combined object that excites her, and then leaves her, and if you leave children in such a state of excitement, what do you expect? They take on exciting games with one another. JSM: I once again went back carefully reviewing for her, one by one, all the former material that appear to still converge in this emotional turmoil, though of course now the new betrayal of David and Florence cancelling sessions with Charlotte, as it were, but then sending in postcards. This time, however, I was very surprised with her answer: “Much more than all that!! . . . but now I forgot . . .” – “Because being invaded by your very strong wish not to come back to analysis ever again, as you began to tell me today; of having nobody to put a wicket to stop you from throwing yourself down the dangerous stairs . . .” DM: . . . that’s right . . . that’s exactly right . . . “preventing you from throwing yourself in the gutter,” really . . . JSM: “. . . from dominating everyone in your games . . .” DM: Right! JSM: Immediately after this she told me what she had “forgotten”: “That I have been enjoying very much making wait at your outside door, exposing my fragility on to the streets, laughing at my hardly controllable need to ring desperately at your bell”. Through the last three months she often told me that “I’m desperately wishing to ring at your door non-stop!” DM: Parents’ bedroom, you see. JSM: Yes, yes . . . to storm in, stop being together!!! The next session she said: “Last night I had many dreams but can’t recall them now.” DM: Yes . . . I can’t recall them now, you see . . . JSM: Indeed; again . . . Then she told me a dream she had a month earlier. She described it as awful. She dreamed that she was going to have dinner with two women-friends of her. They are both divorced. When, in her dream, she arrived at the dining-room, she just found out that one of her friends somehow allowed her to take something out of her purse. Instead, however, of really taking it out of her friend’s purse, Sophie just bit her purse . . . – “I was awfully ashamed! . . . I didn’t want by any means to reveal these feelings of biting . . . ! I was so relieved when I realized that it was just a dream . . .” Then she told me a shred of another dream: she met a woman friend with her five children: two from a man, two more from another man, and the last from

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still another man. In her dream this meeting was in her parents’ garden. In her dream the garden looked just like when she was a child. “There were no barriers between this garden and the neighbours’; one could freely pass from one garden to the other without any boundaries.” Then she told me yet another dream: she dreamed of Roger, a former colleague of hers, “a repulsive, disgusting pig, stupid, son of a whore who tried to blackmail me and with whom I finally went to bed. But by then I used to go to bed with no matter who.” DM: It’s a reference to all the sexual games that she and the gang-friends played in the garden when her parents were not at home, where there were no boundaries, and about all of these games of having babies and making babies, with this man, and that man, and still that man. And, obviously, this woman friend, in her dream, is a very promiscuous woman. This is a little girl who wants babies, babies, babies . . . the penis, you see; many penises around and no boundaries . . . And it is revenge against the parents and their closed bedroom doors. JSM: Oh yes! The many closed doors along the corridor in my apartment. DM: She’s in that very promiscuous mood; and very spiteful toward you as these parents who close their bedroom doors. It’s all very pre-genital: biting, sucking on every penis she sees to get babies . . . biting every other woman in competition for the man, and so on. JSM: I suggested: “So I may have forced you to bite the purse with my interpretations, painfully showing you your dependence . . .” – “. . . the purse had a sausage inside . . .” DM: . . . aaahh! There it comes . . . the purse had a sausage; she should bite this penis out of the breast . . . JSM: “. . . a thick slice of a sausage . . . ,” she added. – “. . . the suggestions I have been offering you about your distress are all you are allowed from my purse, but you don’t want to see that; you rather seem to wish to bite the purse and the sausage . . .” – (long silence) – “Yes . . .” – she now said, in a thoughtful, and yet depressed tone of voice – “. . . perhaps Roger is in fact you . . . ,” she said – and I continued, now tentatively putting her thoughts into words: “I hate you for what you make me see what I do not want at all to see . . . It’s very difficult to admit that you are the core of the anxieties in my dreams . . . It’s difficult for me to come here . . . I always leave depressed.” DM: Believe me, what she says is true. But she also meant to quiet you down, to placate you, because she feels that you’re on the track now . . .

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JSM: “The last two nights I had many dreams but now I can’t recall them. But I’m very happy because I just found a much easier way to come here. I’m completely stupid! Why had I spent TWO YEARS to find this route?!” DM: What was this “easy way” that she suddenly discovered? JSM: A much easier way to deceive me, I think. DM: Probably; but what was it that she in fact refers to? JSM: She found an alternative route to drive to my consulting-room that may perhaps take some four or five minutes from the time she would normally otherwise take. DM: I would like to know how real is this improvement . . . Because, as you said, it sounds like: “Oh, I found an easy way to deal with my analyst. Oh! Now I found a way to placate him and don’t tell him this and that . . .” JSM: . . . to persuade him not to show me what I don’t want to see . . . DM: Quite . . . there are certain things you must never tell your analyst. Especially if he is a man, you must never tell him about your promiscuity, and if he’s a mother, you must never tell her about your wish for babies. I feel very suspicious about this improvement, because it’s too confessional and placatory . . . well, let’s see what happens. The material is really very interesting. JSM: She now rehearses several sentences trying to find the best way to say something, this, I think, being already part of her “Ohhhh! I’m stupid! It took me TWO YEARS to discover an easier way of deceiving mother . . .!!” DM: Quite . . . quite. JSM: So she then offered me a long, convoluted explanation why, in the beginning of her analysis, she has put such a pressure on me not to have me waiting for her at the outside door of my apartment and then accompanying her along the corridor into my consulting-room, and so on. I first of all referred to the labour she put on choosing what she thought was “the best” way of saying something to me. JSM: But she said: “It’s so difficult because there is always such a huge flow of things crossing over one’s mind at the same time.” DM: Secrecy, you see . . . When they say so they are always being secretive and evasive.

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JSM: She then went on in a long, intelligent stretch of rhetoric, saying how dependant she is on me; how afraid she is of herself, being such a hurricane, etc. . . . I felt strangely seeing that I have just been trailing along behind her rhetoric into feeling that the atmosphere of the session was now really pleasant, believing that she was thinking and finding new connections with enthusiasm, and so was I. DM: Yes . . . Be careful . . . She really is throwing you off the track . . . JSM: . . . no doubt, thus putting to a concrete effect her much easier way to come here . . . DM: . . . quite! I mean, I’m quite convinced that she is becoming your good latency child, and really it would be so disturbing if mummy and daddy knew the games that she and her gang-friends play in the garden. JSM: Yes, yes . . . the boundless gardens . . . DM: . . . yes . . . there is no need to tell parents . . . And you get this terrible secrecy of the latency period child, and the sexual games are all built around pregenital sexuality . . . “eating the sausage,” you see . . . JSM: Yes . . . The whole week was basically a display of her honeymoon with herself, her mother, and her daughter, that is, mostly with me, of course, being quite right in having found a much easier way to come here . . . DM: Quite . . . JSM: She decided to reduce her already minimal dose of sleeping pills “because” – she put it – “I feel sick of these shit dependence.” She’s sleeping still less than she used to but feels very well, relaxed, and vital. However, she’s not recalling her dreams. So now I really feel that she did find a marvellous way of driving herself to my consulting-room leading me off-track like an innocent child. DM: Yes . . . Let’s see what happens. It’s really very, very interesting. JSM: However, the next session she reported two dreams, though she said that she had many more but couldn’t recall them. Last night she dreamed of Anthony, a well-known man within the intellectual milieu, who however has recently been linked with wealthy, rightist, homosexual, snobbish milieus. Although he is only in his 30s, he just got married for the third time, but in strange circumstances: the day before his marriage he gathered his men-friends and asked them to choose the wife who he would marry the next day, which they actually did.

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DM: Games in the garden, you see . . . So, it’s coming in her dreams now. It’s really as if a dam has broken, and all the dreams that were being held back are starting to come. But they’re coming in an atmosphere in which she feels: “Oh, it’s all right, mummy and I are close friends . . . mummy is one of the girls now and she’ll laugh about all we do with the boys” JSM: Yes, yes! She also dreamed that she was driving her car. Having just come over the brow of a hill, she suddenly saw several traffic indications pointing in many different directions at the same time, getting her confused, threatening to lead her to a very dangerous situation. DM: “Oh, all these men! . . . all so attractive! There’s one pointing that way; there’s another pointing that way . . . all these penises!” JSM: And my mother-analyst doesn’t close the wooden wicket-gate not to let me throw myself down the dangerous stairs . . . DM: Yes, yes . . . JSM: In her dream, however, all these traffic arrows pointed in M’s direction. At this point she felt frightened and woke up – “I was scared because I don’t want to follow along M’s direction,” that is, of these men who decide, the day before their marriage, whom are they going to marry the next day. She spent the entire Sunday afternoon watching old films of her family and was very impressed with what she saw. She particularly liked watching her oldest brother as a young boy: “He had such a presence . . .” Most of all, however, she praised, deeply and tenderly, her paternal grandfather who taught her mathematics and so many things about life, who played with her and talked with her and often went for long, delightful walks through the country side with her, always in his quiet, tender, caring mood . . . “He’s so big . . . enormous hands and feet . . . and everything he said was always so calm . . . always the image of wisdom.” DM: I mean, penises everywhere . . . big penis, small penis . . . It was a lovely time, because mother and I were at peace since I had really reduced her to the state of an older sister and therefore the competition with her ceased to be obvious ... JSM: Do you mean I myself am now feeling pleased with her and observing her progress quietly? DM: Yes. She really feels that she has got you settled; that you might even agree to stopping the analysis at this point; that she has got you to idealise her, and the feeling that you have taught her all the mathematics that she needs to know, being

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now really free of any disturbing symptom, so she can now abandon herself to M’s direction. JSM: I see . . . Well, and yet, the next session she said: “Last Monday I couldn’t sleep at all and I think that it was because I felt very scared thinking you could be very annoyed with me because I am sympathetic toward M.” DM: Right . . . right . . . That fascist bastard, really . . . “M.” JSM: “I feel so uneasy about this” – she said – “that I’m just thinking now that I have no sympathy at all for M, that I don’t even know him and have no interest whatsoever in knowing him; this is crazy! Why am I so scared to tell you that I feel sympathetic toward M?!” JSM: – “Because” – I would think – “you are terribly afraid of losing your mother-analyst . . .” DM: . . . terribly afraid of when the truth comes out, that you will have nothing more to do with her, yes.

Notes 1. For Meltzer’s concept of geographical confusions cf. Meltzer, 1967, pp. 13ff; 1992, pp. 31ff. 2. “C” for “Carmo”, who attended all the supervision sessions and occasionally participated in the clinical discussions.

CHAPTER 6 The importance of the concept of forgiveness as a key factor in “creating a new way of thinking about things”

Summary This chapter discusses how the introduction of the concept of forgiveness may assist the patient developing a new way of thinking. Without this concept, Meltzer believes, “life may be brought to this: to be bad, to be punished, to be bad . . . No possibility of development . . . [Things will be reduced to] behavior . . . She cannot think of another way which has to do with psychic reality, with the meaning of things, and to come to understand this meaning.” The question of how to best bring the concept of forgiveness into the clinical hour remained unsettled, however. The idea of offering the patient the concrete experience of tolerance as an alternative to the concept of forgiveness was touched upon though inconclusively.

DM: Is this introduction something you have written long ago or do you write it each time?1 JSM: I write it each time. DM: That’s very good because it’s a renewed view of her, which is obviously influenced by the material as it develops. JSM: Sophie was very excited in finding all the “more and more mysteries in my parents’ house! . . . My mother is really full of mysteries!” She was referring to the many drawers full of photographs of the family she’s now discovering, marveled. “There is one photograph, which has always been in the living-room, showing me together with all my siblings. I have always seen it there all my life but only

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now I am able to see it with new eyes! It seems that now I’m bound to love them. I asked my mother permission to take these photos home.” DM: Now, the general trend is under the influence of the parents as a combined object, the wish to recover all the scattered parts of herself represented in her many siblings whom she had always been in Oedipal conflict with, as well as with her best friends, so making progress. But of course, her way of doing it is like a hurricane, as she herself says. She wants to do it all at once, she wants to recapture them, she is not willing to allow them to come together under the attraction of the parents, but wants to go out and seduce them, and control them, and bring them under her control. Not, therefore, in the sphere of her good objects but under her control, you see. Typical Sophie. JSM: Furthermore, she now added: – “I realized that the most important person in my ex-husband’s family was his mother. I did all I could to become her ‘daughter,’ and at last I succeeded. I almost moved into their home and almost lived there for a while.” – “And you also managed to finally rule the house to the smallest detail,” I reminded her. – “All my life I’ve tried to make ‘mothers’ everywhere.” – “You mean, to control them one after the other, just as you tried – and indeed partly succeeded – to do with me here.” – “My relations with my mother have always been so competitive!” . . . DM: And of course she still does this with you all the time; really capturing you by fascinating you, and she is a fascinating creature, as it were. You see, if she weren’t so frightening, she would be less fascinating. She captures people into a sado-masochistic submission to her. JSM: The next session she arrived fifteen minutes late, offering no reason for being late. She said that the previous night she almost couldn’t sleep. – “I had many dreams, but can’t recall them now.” Nevertheless, she remembered having dreamed about me and was very much afraid that I could be very angry with her because of something she had done. Then she dreamed about Ulricha, a colleague of hers, and a distinguished member at her university, much older than her, who suffers from several ailments. During the last few years they worked together on a book – “She was a real mother for me and I was extremely kind with her, sparing her every possible trouble with the book. I let her decide everything about it as it pleased her. However, Ulricha often behaved like a capricious, spoiled little child, being at times very unpleasant to me.” One evening, Sophie decided to go alone to the press trying to get a complicated and demanding work properly and promptly done, being alone with the typographers and feeling very excited about that. That evening she decided to change everything she had previously agreed with Ulricha. She made all these changes not because she has found anything wrong with what Ulricha had been in favor of but because she simply decided to do this way. She made all these changes without giving a word to Ulricha, and

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yet now saying that, when she was turning everything Ulricha had done up-side down she was not at all aware that she was betraying Ulricha. When, that very night, she realized what she had done, she couldn’t sleep, and for a few days couldn’t stop thinking of this. DM: This is the biting of the purse with the sausage in it, you see. The baby who treats the breast as the baby’s baby until she suddenly realizes something about mummy’s other children, or mummy’s relationship to daddy, and then, she bites the breast. What it means in the transference at this point isn’t clear but it has to do with the way she treats you, behaving as if she was frightened of you, as if she was submissive to you, as if she believes that everything you say is correct, and so on, until she gets sexually excited around the men, and then “bang.” JSM: . . . biting the breast-analyst by arriving fifteen minutes late and then telling me: “I had many dreams but now I can’t recall them,” thus turning me into mother-Ulricha and betraying me with the typographers. DM: Probably, probably. JSM: This also seems to refer to the dream she had with me being however frightened to tell it to me lest I could be very angry with her because she had done something she suddenly couldn’t “remember.” DM: Yes . . . Betrayal . . . JSM: Last night she dreamed that someone had ordered Ulricha to work as Sophie’s subordinate and she woke up in a terrible anxiety. DM: That’s like the fairy story where the punishment is to continue doing what you have been doing as a technique of seduction; you have to keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it as a punishment . . . The sorcerer’s apprentice; the story of the red shoes . . . “Ah! not to be responsible, please!” That’s the punishment, you see. JSM: I thought that her feeling frightened referred to her being condemned to become mother’s mother, reversing the arrows and . . . DM: . . . become condemned to be responsible, yes, that’s right. JSM: Then she told me another dream she had that night. She dreamed that she was in a large party, full of people. She was with her sado-masochist ex-lover, and it was a very pleasant dream but she was unable to remember anything more concrete about it except that the party took place in a church. I suggested that during the previous weeks she seemed to have related with me as representing a

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tolerant and rather naïve mother, so that she could safely indulge in a secretive, intense sado-masochistic activity, fearing, however, that at any moment the masochist mother-analyst-Ulricha, now represented by this church, further weakened by all Ulricha’s many ailments, may however find out that she has been betraying her and just put her out. DM: That’s about right, really . . . JSM: “Last night you felt terribly anxious” – I suggested, “because you cheated me to the point of getting me ‘subordinated’ to you, like you did manage to do with Ulricha, though insisting not to be conscious of it.” DM: Yes, the essential thing is betraying the mother . . . JSM: And the way she betrays her is by being secretive, and then bursting in triumph about it in her back and enjoying the “large party” with her sadomasochist ex-lover. DM: Now, the thing that makes for this vicious situation is that she has no concept of forgiveness. She has no concept of mother finding out about her dirty games, but forgiving her. It’s important to keep that in mind. She comes from a catholic tradition, where you don’t get forgiven until you repent. Whereas the protestant tradition, in the psycho-analytic tradition, you aren’t able to repent until you are forgiven. This is very important to remember. JSM: She then told me about Margaret, the only school friend who refused to resume the former friendship links with her, leaving Sophie upset, feeling rather uncanny, not knowing what to think or do about it . . . DM: Margaret being the unforgiving mother, you see. JSM: Oh yes! . . . Now where is her sincerity by this point? She seems sincere with mother-analyst though also sincere with mother-Ulricha for not being conscious of her betrayal? DM: At this point those two sides of her are really both sincere. They’re sincerely daytime loving mother, and sincerely night time masochistic pervert, and sufficiently split from one another, that she doesn’t feel in conflict about it, unless motheranalyst finds out. And she can’t imagine it, if mother finds out, anything could possibly happen except she would be thrown away. She can’t imagine being forgiven for this kind of betrayal. JSM: Surprisingly, she asked me, in anxiety: “But did I fear losing you?!” – “Those fears, connected with cheating me, having pretended that you would

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agree with all Ulricha-mother-analyst decided about the book but then, during the night, excited with the secretive atmosphere in the typography, sliding into the party with your sado-masochist ex-lover, undoing all you have done during the day, those fears of seeing me retaliating and just giving up continuing your analysis, yes.” DM: I wouldn’t agree with you, really. I think that she’s becoming more and more frightened of you realizing the extent to which she manipulates you. And she does manipulate you by being a rather perfect daughter, from the point of view of how she behaves with you, and how she behaves with other people, or what goes on in her dreams. It’s so split off in her that she cannot recognize what a betrayal it is to you. She just tells you, you know, but doesn’t recognize it. Just as a child babbling about what happened in school, when he comes home . . . (now mimicking the voice of a little girl arriving from school and telling mummy): “. . . and Johnny kicked me, and I kicked him . . .”; and then Johnny said: “take down your pants and I took down my pants and they were all thrilled . . . ,” you see . . . She has no idea because they’re so split apart that she cannot imagine that mother is going to be deeply wounded; again the biting of the sausage, you see, biting mother’s breast. And when she realizes it, she’s in despair . . . she doesn’t know what to do . . . the only possibility is punishment; to be thrown out, or to be sentenced to be responsible for her parents and her siblings and be responsible for everything. Your interpretation is a misdirected attempt to integrate the various parts of herself that have been distributed into her siblings, and that the only way that she could imagine doing it is by dominating them in some way. Since she cannot imagine being forgiven by her mother rather than punished, she cannot conceptualize how awfully attractive her mummy and daddy are to all the children. One of the sources of parents’ great power is that they have the power of forgiveness. Not the power of punishment, like the savage god, but the power of forgiveness. JSM: Then she went on, adding: “Last night I had an awful dream. I was in a car but was completely confused with my daughter. Someone else was in the car, perhaps my mother, but I’m not sure. Suddenly, I shouted: “Stop the car! Stop the car! She’s going to be delivered!!” I clearly saw her naked body, and she was pregnant! My daughter and myself we both came out of the car and I saw her opening her legs and a baby beginning to come out of her! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! This is monstrous! A child giving birth to a child! I felt horrified, asked for help in some houses nearby but no one gave a damn about my anxiety!” DM: So here is the punishment, the reversal, you see. That the baby has to give birth to the breast, the baby has to look after the mother, the baby has to take charge of everything . . . of everything, really. . . . This is the punishment by reversal; this is the punishment for pride and ambition and triumph; responsibility, you see; the punishment is responsibility . . . primitive morality, you see.

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JSM: Yes . . . her daughter becomes her whip . . . her scourge. “Last Monday I had an unspeakable night . . . ! I cannot bear another night like that . . . I cannot wish to live any longer after such a night . . . ! I don’t think I could bear it again . . . Yesterday I didn’t sleep a second fearing that I might have another dream like that. In the dream I was crossing a dark corridor full of men dangling from the ceiling and from the walls, hanged by their necks, with a sort of wooden garrottes like those the Romans used to put around the necks of the slaves in the galleys. They were terribly wounded and groaned awfully. They were dangling like gammons, like pieces of meat . . . it was an unbearable vision! I couldn’t figure out what I was doing there. One of the men was called down and relieved from his torture. However, he was so deeply wounded and so full of blood that he would never be able to recover.” She was really very upset about this dream. She described it as of an entire different nature to her usual nightmares. Later in the session she really felt depressed, saying: “I will never recover from my wounds. . . . I know very well that I will never ever recover from the wounds that the years I lived in the ‘Crazy Place’ left on me . . . I have to tell this to my parents before they die . . . I have to tell my father that he was in part responsible for what happened to me. I’m now angry with them . . . fortunately I’m not seeing them these days.” Then she told me that the previous Friday she went to bed with her sadomasochist ex-lover. Saturday she had many dreams but can only recall having dreamed of a cover of a magazine full of naked women and men all in bed. Monday night she went to bed with another friend and had that awful dream of the men hanging down – “Perhaps the dream about this magazine had something to do with my terrible nightmare . . .” DM: So here is a nocturnal betrayal, you see . . . and a kind of trophy room inside her, with all the men that she seduced. JSM: Seduced, I believed, though in both full rage and triumph over her mother, torturing them all, though torturing them against her mother. “Now I think my mother has to pay for all she did to me . . . ,” she said months ago; for betraying me with my god-daddy, the unbearable whore . . . DM: . . . yes . . . all their penises, like a trophy room, yes. JSM: I tended to see it more as the many times she really triumphed over her mother, in full rage, every time she won daddy’s penis from mummy . . . they all seem the same penis, so to speak, the same terrible rage. DM: Yes, yes. But the main thing is that she cannot imagine being forgiven for this kind of behavior at night. . . .

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JSM: . . . at night, meaning, behind her mother’s back, as even now during the week-ends and . . . DM: . . . yes, of course. I mean, she just doesn’t have the concept of forgiveness . . . she is primitive in that sense; reminiscent of a primitive tribe in which the only forgiveness concept is after you have been punished in some terrible way, like the man who is taken down. He is being forgiven after he has been tortured and bled so much that he will probably die anyhow. Therefore, she cannot imagine how you, as her analytic parent, feel about these betrayals, because these are betrayals, you see. JSM: And how would you concretely word it for her? DM: Exactly like that. That she has no concept of forgiveness, and therefore she cannot possibly feel that she is really a mother to her daughter. She is not equipped with parental values and parental emotions. She is really not equipped for motherhood as she herself said before. And she has been a pseudo-mother to her daughter, the kind of mother that she has construed her mother to be to her – doting on her, protecting her from everything, allowing her to throw herself down the stairs, unable to control her anyway. JSM: I suggested that the dream of the cover of the magazine refers to “your relationship with your many siblings in the photo” – “. . . yes . . . what interests me the most now is to talk about them . . . I think they were the main figures in that cover . . .” Later in the session she told me that there are many women trying to approach Henry, the eldest of her siblings. “I wouldn’t admit it! I don’t even conceive of the possibility that he would ever get involved with any woman without telling me” – she warned me bluntly – “Without your permission, you mean” – “It would be the last straw!” Concerning her dream of the dangling men would you have stressed to her her killing of the babies inside mother? DM: I would have stressed the sado-masochistic betrayal; the betrayal which consists of organizing her siblings into a sado-masochistic orgy, the meaning of which, yes, is killing mother’s babies inside mother, as you said. JSM: So let the combined parents enjoy themselves in a private orgy which I am excluded from for they really do not realize how fully triumphant I am over them by slaughtering all the babies they have made without my permission. I’m just slaughtering them inside mother. DM: But the more immediate point here is the betrayal she still remains secret about.

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JSM: I see, yes . . . She then dreamed that she was entering a restaurant together with her sado-masochist ex-lover and saw her mother there with her sister and her sister’s “little appendages,” as she put it, meaning her little children – “They were all having lunch together. My sister is a whore.” Then, in her dream, already in the restaurant, something happened so suddenly that she couldn’t make a clear picture of it but knows that it frightened her. That moment, in her dream, she just suddenly turned her ex-lover into a fly, making him disappear – “It was a terrible dream. That night I felt that I really should say something to my mother about my lover but she would die if she knew him!” She therefore seems to fully confirm all that you have been saying about the concrete reality of her betrayal, her secrecy, her fear of punishment, as well as her deep splitting her day-mother from her night-mother, being good to the former and secretly triumphant and perverse toward the latter. “What seems to me to have suddenly frightened you as you entered the restaurant” – I suggested – “was that you seem to be quite exhibiting daddy’s penis for your mother, right in front of her nose, triumphant, after having seduced her during this long, sweet conversation you both just had the previous night.” [left out material] DM: Probably. JSM: “. . . and you had to transform him into a fly and make him disappear showing me how secretive you have been with me all the time. I can’t realize what you have been doing all the time during the night.” DM: Quite, quite . . . JSM: But I somehow felt that, suddenly, she abandoned the aim of seducing daddy to the aim of seducing mother. DM: Well, the first step, in separating the parents, is to seduce one or the other, it doesn’t matter which, but to separate them. JSM: This is indeed what she now seems to have all the time been trying to do with me, yes . . . preventing the combined object to mature and consolidate inside her. After holiday she again burst in an acting out activity – driving madly, excelling in zeal at her Institute particularly amidst men, trying to seduce this one and that one and the other one, but then realizing the bitter uselessness of all this, the pointless, stupid risks she has been taking, all the energy she has just been wasting. DM: But, again, this is all during the night . . . JSM: But the struggle to put an end to this is more visible now, it seems to me.

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DM: I mean, this is very important. This frantic, manic activity during the night is the equivalent of throwing herself down the stairs without being stopped by the mother or indeed by anyone else. And nothing you can do will stop her. JSM: Which seems to mean: in what way, or ways, have I been unable to stop her? By missing the concept of forgiveness? I still cannot see in what ways have I been missing the point with her. For the next session she told me that she wishes to leave one of her jobs but doesn’t feel strong enough to do it now: “I still feel the need to be protected by those people, framed by them.” DM: Now, that of course has nothing to do with the job but again with the night time. It’s all equivalent to frantic masturbation, to the general pattern of sadomasochistic acting out. Night time, you see. JSM: But she is also informing me of her drive to leave analysis as well, to really throw herself down the stairs in excitement vis à vis her analysis. DM: Quite. JSM: . . . to show mother-analyst all the wrong she has always done with her and revenge on her . . . DM: Yes. JSM: The next session she reported a dream in which she was in a party, a baptism, perhaps – “As I greeted one of my cousins and asked her how she was, she said: “I’m fine . . . everything is fine . . . only I lost my mother.” Although she said she was fine, I could very well see in her face that she was completely lost, in a terrible fright, desperately trying to find her mother. How awful! . . . My poor cousin, always surrounded by so many people, and yet so lonely . . .” DM: She is just projecting what happens to herself when she betrays her mother. JSM: The mother-Ulricha’s business . . . DM: . . . yes . . . JSM: . . . betraying her during the night, reversing, behind her back, all that she had plainly agreed with her during the day . . . DM: Quite. She too loses her. There is the depression into manic, seductive moves, you see.

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JSM: But her fear that her mother-analyst may disappear, that I might give her up and she goes mad . . . DM: . . . it’s the betrayal of the mother that matters, really. JSM: So you do not agree that her dream referred to how she fears that I may just drop this betraying little girl on the rails the moment the train is about to flash through, like she has done to the baby she was holding in her arms in that dream? DM: Well, she hasn’t told you how she betrayed you, but you can see from the dream that her whole weekend has been spent betraying you. I mean, if it’s not seducing men, it’s masturbation in the form of frantic activity, endangering herself by driving that foolish way, all of these are betrayals of her mother. Throwing herself down the stairs is a kind of blackmailing the mother: “If you take your eyes off me, I’ll throw myself down the stairs.” JSM: – Oh yes! I see . . . Not closing her eyes during the night as a baby in the cradle [left out material], yes . . . Then she recalled how disturbing it was for her to attend the wedding of the same cousin she recently dreamed of – “It’s a bit of a crime to suddenly put a baby in such a young girl’s hands,” – she said, sadly. She then dreamed that she was with a friend at the edge of a swimming-pool. The water was frozen. Her friend, Helen, had in fact a terribly sad personal story. In her dream she was telling Helen Helen’s own story without realizing that she was telling it to Helen herself – “It was awful to swim in that frozen water” – she then just said, repeating it a few times, in the same sad, surprised tone of voice, as if she was somehow condemned to always swim in this frozen water. That evening she saw several adolescents injecting heroin with the same syringe in the backyards of a building: “I felt terribly disturbed by this but nobody seemed to worry the least about this, not even doctors! Doctors are all beasts!!! They don’t really give a damn! They are just doing their job, full stop!” DM: You see how urgent it is to bring her into contact with a concept that she doesn’t have, the concept of forgiveness? JSM: And you would put this to her straight away about her inability to bring forward the concept of forgiveness? DM: Yes . . . JSM: About the betrayal . . . DM: Yes. The fact that the parents don’t know what the children are doing at night is taken by her as evidence that they don’t give a damn.

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JSM: I resist bringing in the concept of forgiveness. I would tend to phrase it in terms of tolerance and understanding. I have qualms about the concept of forgiveness. DM: . . . you see . . . without the concept of forgiveness, the only alternative to being this naughty, betraying girl at night is to become a good girl . . . that’s the only alternative . . . to lose her imagination, her vitality, to be chronically depressed, and good . . . obedient . . . she can’t see any alternative, really. JSM: And indeed, in the following sessions I felt her worn down, eroded, complaining of being “very tired and sick of everything,” mentioning again her wish to quit her job . . . DM: . . . yes . . . she is feeling very helpless at this point. As the coming together of her objects has clarified the split in her self, which is mainly a split in being a good child in the daytime and a bad child at night. She cannot see any way of dealing with this. And she is convinced that the only way of dealing with this is to keep the bad child secret from mummy because if she finds out punishment will ensue. Secrecy to avoid punishment, but the whole thing is hopeless, really. JSM: I asked her whether she has any reliable alternative to quit her job at her office. “No” – she said – “Should I have any I would have already quit it.” I suggested that she was saying that should she have any alternative to leave the pain she has been experiencing in her analysis she would of course have already left. DM: But this doesn’t take into account that if she had any alternative way of thinking about things she would do it; but she has no alternative . . . either be bad or be good . . . behaviour, you see, not thinking . . . She cannot think of another way which has to do with psychic reality, with the meaning of things and to come to understand this meaning . . . and it’s only the forgiving parents who can help her to find the meaning . . . JSM: . . . or the tolerant, and yet unfailing truthful and thinking parents who show her the concrete example of both understanding – because I tell her all I think – and tolerant because I do not send her out. DM: Still . . . the parent who is not forgiving can only help her to find whether it is good or bad, and what sort of punishment she deserves, you see. JSM: The next session she seemed surprisingly happy and active. However, at virtually each sentence she unexpectedly asked me: “Are you following me? – Are you following me?” – “It would seem that you are not sure that I’m listening to you.” – “I don’t know why I’m asking you this . . . you may well feel sick of me and grow wearied.”

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DM: Yes, again, she is feeling very helpless at this point not knowing what to do because not knowing what to think . . . the whole thing is hopeless, really. JSM: This would seem to me an alternative: showing her that I am really following her, regardless of her betrayals, and therefore allowing her to find her own way by thinking about this difficult problem, instead of being bound to just repeat, and repeat, and repeat. This may perhaps bring her the concrete experience of being understood, on the one hand, and on the other hand, being fully tolerated. I do accept it; I do follow her as close as I can, and allow her to experience it by herself, for this is the truth of my feelings. I don’t think I have the capacity for forgiving her and don’t wish to have that capacity. It really sounds to me too godish vis à vis his creatures . . . This would seem an alternative way of dealing with her betrayals without introducing the concept of forgiveness which I do not think I can do, to forgive. But how would you concretely introduce the issue of forgiveness to her? DM: That she is lacking a concept that is the essence of parental feelings toward children, that is the readiness to forgive them. This is the pre-requisite for a child to feel sincerely remorseful. To feel guilty is no good; children are very good at feeling guilty, but guilty is an emotion that only wants one thing: that is to be punished, and get it over with so they can do it again. JSM: Right as in the Catholic world, yes. DM: . . . to be bad, to be punished, to be bad . . . No possibility of development, you see. There must be this other element, that is the essence of parental feelings toward children, of recognizing how undeveloped children are, how they need to be taught, how they need to be helped, how they need to be forgiven, or else they cannot feel really remorseful. And if they cannot feel sincerely remorseful, they cannot overcome these forms of behavior.

Note 1. Every new report begins with a preamble in which I briefly survey what, at each time, seems to me are the main traits of Sophie’s personality, as well as some of the major problems dealt with in the previous supervision sessions. This was expected to bring the case alive to Dr. Meltzer, making it easy for him to immediately reconnect himself to the core of the case at this new point.

CHAPTER 7 “. . . it has to be made in the depths . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . .”

Summary In the course of the last few months a well-structured perverse organization surfaced. Eventually it was viewed to root in a relation with the mother which was seen as still not “anchored in goodness; it’s only anchored in sensuality.” This chapter portrays two particularly important forms of acting in the counter-transference consisting in (i) allowing myself to be persuaded, without the slightest conscience of it, not to interpret in the transference, and (ii) actively blurring my own apprehension of the meaning of the material. I therefore suddenly realized that I have been gently persuaded to degrade the analysis into a “gentle,” and even friendly psychotherapy. Confusion is more vividly shown to play a key role in the root of perversions. A passionate “love for the truth” is once again left at the core not only of every analysis, but of the mature organization of one’s personality.

JSM: Henry, Sophie’s elder sibling, and his wife invited Sophie to spend a week abroad with them. She demurred her decision for some time for she was going to lose a whole week of analysis, but now decided to go. The reasons why she considered accepting the invitation were discussed. They all appear to come down to her wish to revenge on me and further provoke me. As she told me about her decision, however, she suddenly launched in a surprisingly cynical assault on me: – “I’m leaving in an unbearable state: beset by nightmares during the night, beset by colics during the day, and I am living like this for already four years! . . . there is no difference at all since I began my analysis.” She kept hammering this point

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at me for about fifteen minutes in such a piercing tone of voice. I was surprised by the violence with which her sudden fury invaded me. I told her this but she simply ignored it altogether and continued her burst of fury just as if I had said nothing, making it very clear that she would not listen to a word from me. So I waited for the end of her burst of fury and then told her: “You seem to have been having, right here, in the session, a nightmare about your decision to leave for a week for no purpose other than to revenge on me, betraying me and provoking me into a sado-masochistic response.” Surprisingly, she laughed, and said: “In fact there is something aggressive in what I’m saying but I don’t understand against whom.” – “You are all the time making and undoing alliances against someone trying to enrol people into sado-masochistic relations.” – “You are right . . . I’m in fact doing that all the time . . . Just now, in arriving here, I noticed that I was making and destroying alliances in my mind every second. I’m all the time doing this in my mind, yes.” She then tried to blur the whole problem of her going abroad just as if there had never been the slightest misgiving about it, ending up her discourse with a definitive statement: “. . . and this is the truth as you know.” – “No I don’t. I know that it is not true, and you yourself know it is not true.” – “Well . . . I don’t really know what is the truth any more . . . perhaps it isn’t, yes. . . .” But the next moment she again burst out in yet another astonishingly cynical and provocative verbal burst, always choosing new directions as I interpreted her assaults, now telling me about the fun she is going to have abroad; the excitement in showing her sibling a town he had never been to before which, however, she is so familiar with, guiding him through it, etc., in excitement, I thought, of showing the innocent daddy-analyst how marvelous it is to make babies with her instead of making them with old mummy. DM: But also excited because, having given up her sado-masochistic lover, she is now provoking you to fury and sadism. JSM: Oh yes! I see . . . She then told me a dream she had in which a ten-year-old girl whom she actually knows [her daughter’s age] was pregnant. “In my dream I saw her very large belly! It was awful! I can’t stand this sort of thing!” The child in her dream is in fact the daughter of a former male friend, “. . . a man with whom, in my adolescence, I had an absolute intimacy. We hadn’t the slightest secret from each other. However, he afterward turned into a dirty, disgusting fellow. By that time I felt deeply confused because I was just about leaving for the ‘Crazy Place’ and perhaps getting pregnant. Both things were very much confused in my mind.” She then, once again, burst out suddenly in a massive contempt and arrogant assault on her ex-husband, “As if” – I suggested – “you were all the time spiting in his face one of the greatest secrets of your whole life: “My baby is not yours but daddy’s!! You aren’t but a lousy tool I have used to get my baby!!” “This, then” – I continued – “was how you succeeded in carrying out your life-long determination never to give up what you felt so deeply deprived of as you emphasized so much in the very first session of your analysis, that is, your ‘father’s [absolute] attention,’

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as you then put it. But you finally seem to have succeeded in having the perfect baby from the perfect incestuous liaison. A god-like child from god’s penis; the summit of triumph . . .” – “. . . and all my friends thought of my marriage and of me as the perfect wife of a perfect couple, while inwardly I laughed at them, I laughed at them all in my mind, even at all my best friends.” – “Being very confused between getting pregnant and fleeing to the ‘Crazy Place’ to get pregnant from your father in full blown triumph.” She seemed to me suddenly amazed with my suggestion and calmed down into a thoughtful mood. DM: This is all about her sado-masochism. It’s about the façade she maintained but inside has been perverted, laughing scornfully at everybody who accepted her façade. The point seems to be that she is now doing it with you, as she is now provoking you to be her sadistic lover. JSM: Yes . . . and still worsening her deep confusion about her daughter and about who, in both her mind and in reality, is the real father of her daughter. DM: . . . deeply confused, yes. JSM: Then I just began to hint that I may have been somehow acting in the counter-transference for some time now without noticing it at all. For every time she wants to just stop me asking any further question I feel the need to ask in order get things clear and not allow her to slide into vagueness and blurring metaphors so that I can really get a clear picture of the material, she would very subtly change the music of her voice conveying, subliminally, a powerful threat which, I now realize, produces some concrete effect on me. This threat ran something like this, I now think: “look here, little innocent fellow . . . should you ever dare to ask me any further question I’ll immediately blow you up just like I do to you with my diarrheas!!” Only now do I begin to realize that she is a master in modulating the music of her voice so as to inform me about what exactly she does wish me to do under the whip of the whims of her omnipotent desires, leaving me of course no possible choice but to immediately and unwaveringly obey her and submit to her – of course! Otherwise, the subtle modulation of her voice makes it quite clear, I’m promised another explosion of her both infuriated and infuriating arrogance and contempt. So the moment I realized this I immediately became much, much more attentive to this key question and decided to ask her as many questions as I feel necessary to get a clear picture of what she tells me, never to be dragged into any kind of misty pictures about anything anymore. This, I think, has immediately proved highly rewarding in many ways; and I am sure she immediately understood it in the slight change of my own tone of voice, hopefully more gentle, and yet unswerving. DM: Oh yes! . . . This write-up of her is quite different from previous write-ups. And it seems to me that you suddenly realized that she is deeply perverted and that you have made bold, really, to question of the sincerity of her behavior

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with you. And on the one hand, you have become this Mark pursuing her with a big knife in a squalid place [left out previous material], jealous, and trying to attack her intercourse with her friend, but you are also the friend, who is the companion of her sado-masochism . . . JSM: Yes, yes. . . . And yet, the moment I stop her from dragging me away from the thread of transference and the need to ask her as many concrete questions as I feel the need to, I of course run into the threat of becoming her new sadomasochist lover. I also found out that some of her statements should not be responded to having in mind her actual words, but mostly the music of her voice. I give you a concrete instance of this. She may make what appears to be a reasonable request. But if she couches it in a “strange” music, in an “obey-meright-now, silly little boy!!-like” tone, I should address the tone rather than the words. The tone tells me more about her true state of mind than her precise words. Now I need the bones of it and I inquire into it until I have them. DM: Quite. JSM: The next session she said: “I woke up early this morning frightened thinking that I could be pregnant. Now I often think of pregnant women.” Then she told me how terribly impressed she feels about pregnant little girls. She has just read something about this during the week-end and told me about an awful quarter in Lisbon – quarter X, say – where all these things happen every day. I told her that this quarter seems deeply associated with the core of her nightmares. – “In what way?” – “When you decide to blow up every wicket and throw yourself down the really dangerous stairs you are throwing yourself right into the core of this quarter, just as you have done when you left for the ‘Crazy Place’, getting little Sophie pregnant from daddy in secret, as you really seem to have done once again, in your dream, but then you got frightened because you were actually caught, during the night, in this awful quarter, getting terribly confused not knowing anymore whether you are five or forty, who you really are. But you also seem to have slid into that awful quarter by having done all you could to get me involved in a sado-masochistic relationship with you. Then, the only way out is to torture yourself with guilt . . .” – “. . . feeling that I can’t deserve a coat in winter, as I actually felt.” [which her sado-masochist ex-lover offered her as soon as she arrived from the “Crazy Place” as a wreck] – “Yes. But then, during the night, you may once again blow up every wicket I put to you here” – and I quietly revised for her, one after the other, the many instances in which she seemed to have done exactly this since the beginning of her analysis, tramping on everyone, triumphing on her mother, though bringing it all to the transference. She laughed, and said: “You are right . . . it’s very difficult for me not to do it with everyone . . . I really have to refrain myself terribly from doing exactly that every time I come here. This is the only place in the world where I entirely submit to someone’s rules; ever !!!” Then, referring to her need to be punished as her

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nightmares often seem to suggest, she told me, confirming what you have anticipated: “You are right but I do not realize the crimes I commit.” DM: Right . . . So she has probably experienced that you are tightening your technique with her; she is undoubtedly experiencing you as being strengthened by some other figure and of you taking up the meaning of a combined object. So instead of manipulating you on the surface keeping you at a distance from the core of her perversity as she began to do, she has now turned to provoking you to a sadistic attack on her . . . (long silence) . . . thus making you Mark pursuing her. JSM: For about two months now she has been complaining of sleeping very badly. She’s very anxious about her dependence on her daughter, now realizing that her daughter is so perfect because Sophie herself needs her to be so. DM: Quite . . . JSM: I now began to realize that I have been acting in the counter-transference in yet another way. I suddenly realized that I have been yielding to yet another well disguised pressure she has been putting on me not to interpret in the transference. Again, this is subtly conveyed in a slight modulation of the music of her voice, a technique she is really a master of, by couching what she tells me into an undertone by which she would gently inveigle me into a “friendly silence” as well as into “kindly” dodging the relevant points of the material. I was astonished with her expertise in driving me off track. I began to realize that the transferential meaning of the material she brings in now suddenly appeared really blurred to me, as if through a sweet curtain of mist. I began wondering what was really going on. DM: Bion says: “Patients don’t have to resist; they know how to make the analyst resist interpreting.” JSM: I was amazed when I began to suspect that there was something strange going on in my mind, a surprising unclarity of perception. Then I felt puzzled noticing how relieved I felt if only I managed to keep things outside the transference with her . . . DM: That is, to do psychotherapy, analyzing the patient’s relationships with other people. JSM: Exactly! “Strawberry-jam”-analysis, yes . . . What a relief! . . . What a sweet, gentle therapy ruled by two friends, Sophie and I . . . I was also astonished to watch how easily she can just wipe out from her memory, or just kindly destroy what seemed so clear for her the previous day, showing no trace at all of what she herself has stated quietly and clearly the day before, like the little black girl with the strips of hair saying one day “yes,” the other “no” [left out material].

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DM: But there is still the problem of how to deal with a splitting process in her – which one side is outside [the claustrum], and the other side is inside. I think that this degree of omnipotent perversity is probably based on projective identification, her really living in mummy’s bottom . . . her pleasure, her perversity, is in mummy’s rectum; the perversity of a sado-masochistic relationship. Well, we’ll see. The thing about her daughter is that she is, as it were, a “stolen child,” a child based on projective identification at that time, as you said. But since she got rid of her husband, the present problem is really dedicating herself secretly to her perversity, to her sado-masochism. So, we will wait for that to come forth. JSM: The whole session was again busy with her dependence on her daughter’s obsessive rituals (spending hours organizing her files for the school, etc.), painfully realizing that “I feel completely lost if she doesn’t perform her tasks perfectly.” Now it became quite clear for her that she has burdened her daughter with the odd mission of becoming a protective shield for her feelings of persecution. I suggested that she vitally needs her daughter’s perfection to keep bringing together all that she damages inside herself during the night. DM: Yes, I think her daughter is really a baby stolen from daddy’s penis and that the problem is of how to keep her alive, that she is terribly frightened of this baby who may suddenly turn to shit. JSM: Yes, yes! You’ll see. The next session she arrived twenty minutes late because of an acute colic and diarrhea – “Something happened during the night” – she said – “but I cannot recall what it was. Now I dream but forget my dreams . . . I become terribly anxious when you told me that I stifle my daughter.” She’s now having a normal, healthy diet for the first time in her adult life. – “I have never been able to give a thought to what I ate: I always put in my mouth the first thing I got my hands on.” Besides, she usually keeps at her easy reach what she knows are the most aggressive food for her – “Now I can think of what is better for me to take and I now choose things to cook.” DM: Without a dream, you can’t really show her what is happening in her sleep in which this huge fecal penis is assaulting her, and she is submitting to it, having, in consequence, this shit baby from this shit penis. It’s the core of her perversity, really. Let’s see if it emerges. JSM: I suggested that the real mess she has just made of the other session seemed a way of showing me, right there in the session, how persecuted she seems to be: “You now can think of the food you take in but perhaps not yet about how little Sophie has got pregnant in this awful quarter, and now, being very confused, seems to fear that this is a diarrhea-baby.” DM: This kind of phantasy arises in connection with toilet training, very early, in the second year of life, when the child has stolen the nipple from the breast,

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and is submitting herself to this stolen nipple, which now is this fecal penis attacking her bottom . . . (silence) . . . it’s quite a complex thing, really, the way in which the stolen nipple becomes the fecal penis that attacks the baby inside mummy’s bottom . . . We should be able to see it emerging in her dreams now. JSM: The next session she arrived fifteen minutes late without offering any reason to be late. She again couldn’t recall her dreams. She spent the whole session reviewing very tender memories about her infancy, all speaking of a happy child who feels protected, secure, and contained, always playing in the safe quarter of her parents’ home and gardens. I did not see what has been disguised behind this back-drop, however. DM: Yes, you see, good day time bits of herself, and not mentioning the perverse night time bits, not recalling her dreams. JSM: I see! And arriving late with no reason for being late, yes . . . I’m worried about her . . . The previous Saturday she had a meeting with two communist friends of her who told her dramatic fragments of their lives in prison during the dictatorship. One of her friends was born in prison, the other spent many years of his childhood and adolescence there, his father in a cell, his mother in another cell, and he himself, then aged fourteen, in still another cell. The most awful part of this experience for this young man was the moment when the door of his cell was shut, every evening, leaving him alone, separated from everyone. DM: Here it comes, you see. The delegated . . . ; the shutting of the door of the cell. JSM: This too was the most terrifying moment for her as she listened to her friends’ descriptions of their experiences in prison. That night she had an awful nightmare. She dreamed that she forgot to express her gratitude to her beloved Henry, her eldest sibling, because he took good care of her daughter when she was only four months (in the dream, not in reality). She made no associations except the emphasis she put on how awful it was. Some of the most tender, happy, protective memories of her infancy are closely associated with Henry. DM: Right. Again, those are the day time memories. How, when the lights go out, she forgets her gratitude, and this gentle and kind care of the baby turns into a nightmare. The trouble is that they’re both true. It’s not just the one that is true and the other is false. The problem is with the part of her that lives in this awful quarter and loves it. JSM: . . . yes . . . and loves it . . . and loves the ugly side of the world, yes . . .

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DM: They are both true and real, but one of them is living in an unreal world, inside the mother, and until it comes out of there, there is no possibility of their coming together. JSM: But don’t you think that this dream shows her being frightened? I mean, this is a moment where she begins to realize “how lucky I am that my analyst wasn’t turned into the fecal, soiled fellow I’ve tried to turn him into”?; “how lucky I am that my daddy-analyst hasn’t joined me in the ugly quarters I tried to seduce him into”? I mean, she seems to begin to realize how painful and indeed unfortunate it is for her to still linger inside mother’s bottom . . . DM: The trouble is that Henry, whom she is so grateful to, is really mother’s nipple seen by her as daddy’s penis. And therefore, when the lights go out, this Henrypenis-nipple quickly changes into the Henry-fecal penis. She is not anchored to her relationship to the mother yet . . . it’s still all daddy, and that has to be cleared up first: the devotion to you as a mother who gives her the nipple, not as the good daddy who gives the baby his penis to suck, you see. This is an important difference. JSM: And would you interpret to her such key point in these exact terms? DM: Yes. What I’m saying is that both of these things, I mean . . . the question of trying to say: “One is true and one is false,” and the other is that her gratitude to Henry is her gratitude to you as a man. This must be clarified. That you are very good to her in the day time, that you give her your penis, that she tells you to do this, and to do that, and that you are submissive to her. That isn’t any good. You have to be the maternal transference in the day time, and then we can get her out of this projective identificatory situation inside the prison when the lights go out and the door closes. The door closes, “bang!” and what happens when the door closes? That is the problem now. You will find that what happens is that at the moment the door closes, she begins her masturbation. And she enters this realm of the claustrum of the mother, into her rectum, and this good penis now becomes the bad penis. We’ll see if there is any of it in here. JSM: When you say “masturbation” do you mean the concrete acting of masturbation, or do you mean acting in a phantasy? DM: Oh no, the concrete . . . the concrete getting her fingers in her bottom, the baby who gets her fingers in her bottom. And it is continuous into adult life; it’s enacted in masturbation, it’s enacted in sexual activities, and so on. Her sadomasochistic lover gets into her bottom; anal intercourse, etc. JSM: But how could you trace this in her dreams? I mean, where exactly in her dream, do you read this?

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DM: You have to wait for the dreams to come, you can’t hurry it. JSM: Yes, but none of the dreams has as yet shown this as clearly as you has just described it. DM: No, it’s not here yet. JSM: Ah, ok! So you expect it to appear soon in her dreams. DM: Yes, I think . . . JSM: . . . probably confirming the nightmare about the prison and terrifying moment of the shutting of the door . . . DM: Yes. JSM: In the second dream of that night she was with Mark in his house but his wife was spying on her everywhere. DM: Mark, here, is connected with Henry, you see, and he is this good friendly nipple, whom she has seduced into being a penis and coming into her, because she has had an affair with Mark before. JSM: But before this, in another dream, Mark has pursued her along dark lanes, blind alleys, squalid places threatening her from behind with a big knife. DM: And she had, earlier in the analysis, seduced you into a more submissive position with her, you see. JSM: Oh yes . . . DM: Now, this business of his wife spying on her everywhere, you get into a situation which you have to watch for opportunities to interpret to her. There’s a situation in which the mother, as a whole object, is separated in the child’s mind from the breast and nipple as a part object. And the mother as a whole object is felt to be watching and spying upon what the child is doing with the breast and nipple. Keep that in your mind. The nipple, particularly seen as a part-object, and the mother as a whole object watching the baby to see what she is doing with that nipple. This is a breast-feeding situation where the baby is treating the nipple as a penis, and the mother, as a whole object, is watching this and saying: “What are you doing? Why are you licking it, why aren’t you sucking? Why are you playing with it? What’s going on here, in your little mind?” JSM: Really fascinating! The day before she has attended a concert of jazz. In the end, however, she felt absolutely exhausted, refused to have a late meal with her

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friends, was sad about that, and came home alone – “I had an awful night. All I can recall having dreamed was a fight between two groups of children. In my dream, a child told me: ‘we can’t fight any more because we have lost our strength.’ Later, however, they were fighting again and I asked them what happened. One of the children told me: ‘Now I have a “mortorio” in my mouth, so I regained my strength.’ [“mortorio” is the name given to some patches of land, in the town where Mark lives, were there was, long ago, a terrible pest which destroyed all the vine-yards of the region. The destructive violence of that pest was such that no vines grew in that region ever again. The word “mortorio” also carries obvious overtones of death, mortuary, and so on]. Then the child opened her/his mouth and showed a strange, hand-made figure in clay, both human and animal.” So no longer a nipple but a fecal penis, it would seem, or a combined object in the sense of both nipple and a fecal penis. DM: Yes; go ahead JSM: So she went on: – “I was horrified with all this.” She then told me that every time she sees other parents innocently showing photographs of their children she feels “frozen,” thinking: “how could they possibly do such a thing?!” I suggested that she had to conceal from everyone that her daughter really is her father’s child, the great trophy witnessing to her absolute triumph over her mother and indeed over all women. She however seemed very anxious not really knowing where inside her daughter had been made: is she a dirty fecal baby? Is she not? DM: So, we’re really getting on with her now. What has emerged now is the split in her – when the lights are on, she can be quite a good child; but she knows that as soon as the lights go out, she will change. The change that occurs in her, is the change of gaining her strengths again. As soon as the lights go out, she feels weak, and she gains strength by submitting to her sadistic friend, and getting this shit-penis in her mouth. That is the important thing . . . these feces in her mouth. JSM: How would you tell her this? DM: Exactly like that. JSM: But how would you make clear to her the deep confusion between a genital penis and a fecal penis-in-her-mouth? DM: It’s this clay figure. JSM: Of course. But how would you actually phrase it to her so that it may carry conviction, instead of alarming her of getting her even more confused? DM: It’s a representation of her feces that have now become available in her hand to be put in the baby’s mouth, to nourish it. It’s the feces in her hand, put into

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her mouth . . . to recover her strength, you see. And the strength she recovers is by being on the winning side. Because, when the lights go out, it becomes this communist world, and the only way you can survive in this communist world is to join the communists, and to be the mistress of the communist leader, to persecute the anti-communists, and so on. You have to change sides and become one of the tyrants, join with the tyrants. And to do that you have to eat the fecal penis . . . When the good part becomes just a façade for hiding what happens at night, when the real fun begins; it’s the powerful part, the political power of sadism, satanic powers, and so on. JSM: . . . which seems to be what your paper “Tyranny” is about (cf. Meltzer, 1973/1979). DM: Yes. Whether she is going to tolerate this we don’t know yet. The trouble is that the good part of her is still so confused between nipple and penis, between vagina and mouth, that it’s not anchored in goodness, it’s only anchored in sensuality; and one needs to pay attention to both of these, to getting the good part of her attached, without confusion, to the mother and to the nipple. She is a very powerful girl, and deeply perverted. JSM: What do you mean by: “Whether she is going to tolerate this we don’t know yet . . .”? DM: Well, whether she is willing to give up her perversity. Now, of course, the question of her daughter has to be dealt with also. She has behaved, in relation to her daughter, as you have repeatedly said, as if her daughter was stolen from her father’s penis, under her mother’s nose, and therefore of doubtful value, and doubtful validity, really joining with her in this criminality, as it were. And she has enacted this by being so obsessional about her daughter, requiring her to be perfect. Any slight defect in her daughter would reveal her incestuous origins, you see. So, the question of her daughter has to be brought into the transference, in relation to her confusion between nipples and penises. JSM: Do you see this confusion between nipple and penis related to her daughter emerging in the transference? DM: But you have already told her, that moving to the “Crazy Place” and getting married to her tutor was equivalent to getting this child from her father. JSM: No, I mean, in the transference . . . she may as well be very confused concerning the value of her own nipple as she fed her daughter, and therefore, confused about the value of her feeding her. And indeed she herself has said “I don’t know anymore what is good and what is bad.”

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DM: Deeply confused, yes. JSM: And yet, I think that there still is another side of her relationship with her daughter. For her mother was reported to have been rather seriously depressed when Sophie was born. She now seems to be somehow repairing, through her daughter, the damages her mother’s depression may have left on her. She may have felt abandoned and now seems to feel urged to repair this. Recently I was surprised when she told me: “I understand my mother . . . ,” meaning, “I understand my mother, having always struggled with difficult pregnancies, having lost perhaps a few babies both before and after having me, how she might have felt when she had me, fearing to lose me, not knowing whether I would thrive.” DM: There’s emerging in the material some reparativeness toward her mother, yes. JSM: And her going back to all her best school friendships, which she has severed herself from for twenty years, now trying to resume all these links in great joy, they being, in her own words, “. . . the people with whom I’m most happy with at present.” DM: But she’s always saying to you: “You’re doing marvelously, you’re making wonderful changes in my life . . . but don’t touch this . . . keep away from that.” JSM: And yet, an undertone of sincerity and a true feeling of having injured herself really badly begins to emerge, it would seem to me. DM: Where is that? JSM: On page 10 (reads). So she does acknowledge all this and feels unequivocally worried and wounded . . . DM: Yes, but the trouble is, you see, that she says (reads): “Still, I have to give him [her father] constant support otherwise he would never stand the trial.” . . . JSM: Yes, but now she realizes that this was all completely crazy (reads): “I was mad! What’s the meaning of this?! I was injuring myself time and again!” . . . She is really realizing that her omnipotence and her thirst for triumph is not repaying, is not rewarding anymore. DM: Don’t be in a hurry with her. JSM: Don’t you agree with this reading?

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DM: No, I don’t . . . You have a long way to go with her before she can be sincere with you. I mean, she always has two minds, therefore she can’t really be sincere yet. So, you can’t really tell yet what will happen when she is up against it with this clarification of her zonal confusions outside,1 and the clarification of her sadomasochism inside, and of her having to decide which is more important to her. So you’re not at the crisis with her yet, and you cannot tell yet what will happen . . . wait and see. JSM: You are rather pessimistic about the possibility of an evolution. DM: Oh no, no . . . I’m not pessimistic, but I know that this decision, for dedicated perverts – and she is certainly a dedicated pervert – that this decision between perversion and clarity is a hard decision for them to make, and it can’t be hurried, really. You have to take your time with her . . . You have to give her plenty of time . . . it isn’t an intellectual decision, really, it has to be made in the depths . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . . (long silence) . . . in love for the truth . . .2

Notes 1. For the concept of zonal confusion cf. Meltzer, 1967, pp. 23–31. 2. The last two chapters of this book speak dramatically for the truth, and indeed the deep reach of Meltzer’s words.

CHAPTER 8 “It’s not the badness that has made the secrecy; it’s the secrecy that has made the badness”

Summary Donald Meltzer’s claustrum theory (cf. Appendix) is believed to shed a whole new light over both the nature and meaning of perversions. This new light can be shown to provide us with much better guidance as to how we should perhaps best deal with this kind of pathology in the concreteness of the clinical hour. Some of the connections between perversions and the qualities of thinking are discussed both in this and the next few chapters. The significance of masochism in psychic reality is believed to “. . . always turn out to be the killing of mother’s babies [inside the mother].” A subtle readjustment of the problem of interpretation in the transference versus interpretation outside is now suggested.

JSM: For the last three months Sophie has been without dreams, often saying, however: “Last night I had many dreams which, in the morning, were quite present in my mind, but which I can no longer recall.” In this session, however, she told me two dreams. In the first, she was watching an exhibition which she has recently viewed. The artist, whom she admires, has recently died. In her dream, she left the gallery, entered a car, and sat on the back seat. The driver was me. Clare, an old woman who devotedly served at her parents’ house for many years while Sophie was a child, entered the car too and sat at her side. Sophie has in fact always loved Clare very tenderly and deeply admires her. “She is my memory,” Sophie once told me, because Clare tells her endless real stories about her infancy. In her second dream she saw herself at the Spanish Square in Lisbon, the Spanish Embassy being in fact a beautiful palace, full of art-objects. In her dream,

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she was with a fat, repulsive woman and was going to meet a real and well-known Italian writer. In her dream, the underground floor of the Spanish Embassy was a large, dark, labyrinthic place, where she located the mental hospital of the film she had watched in which a defiant American soldier who insisted in denouncing the torture and the many abuses the heads of the American Army have been doing all the time in Vietnam has himself been tortured and had finally been confined. Then someone came to fetch the Italian writer also to confine him to this mental hospital. – “I felt terribly anxious with what was going on. The fat woman didn’t bother the least! . . . the least, can you imagine?!” As she described her dreams, she often jumped from one dream to the other, as well as to past dreams and present situations, wording all this in what seemed to me a rather disconnected narrative. I felt exhausted trying to put these many bits together so that I could finally follow the thread of her meaning closely, hoping to make good sense of all this. Suddenly, however, I realized that I was again joining yet another of her ingenious strategies to lead me away from seeing the transference in her dreams and associations. The evidence for this very interesting strategy seemed to me to again be located in a continuous undertone of threat running quite inconspicuously all through the music of her voice though conveying, I finally felt, a tone of threat quite similar to those American Commanders sent to the soldier in the film, meaning something like this, I “heard”: “if you don’t immediately obey to me in simply forgetting about this troubling type of interpretations I’ll no longer tolerate, I’ll just shut you up just like the soldier in the film.” I again was quite astonished watching how I seemed to be deliberately blurring my own perception of the transferential meaning of her material under this subtle, subliminal pressure. So now I went back to the dream of the Spanish Embassy. Many months ago she told me about a woman friend who, during the turmoil immediately following the Portuguese revolution, in 1974, which ended half a century dictatorship, there was an assault on the Spanish Embassy. This assault had been led by a small group of extreme leftists. This assault was in fact largely in the news at the time. The people who assaulted the Embassy stormed into the palace, defenestrated much of the collection of art-objects of the Embassy and finally set it on fire. “Your first dream” – I then suggested – “seems to me to refer to how you assaulted, set on fire, and defenestrated my words and thoughts and my efforts to closely follow your meaning . . .” – “. . . ah! . . . yes . . . I have done all that to you in my forgotten dreams . . . and finally I made you my driver . . . perhaps . . . ,” she said, now in a quiet, surprisingly agreeing tone of voice. – “. . . thus succeeding in blurring my mind, diffusing my ability to interpret in the transference, and therefore, seducing me into a friendly talk . . .” DM: . . . quite! However, the immediate significance of the dream, it seems to me, is that when she is in contact with her mother – in a loving, respectful, and admiring contact with her mother –, her behavior toward the father – who thinks that he is driving the car and therefore in control of everything – is essentially one

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of seducing him into a sexual relationship with her, in which his penis is then vandalized. So, it’s not so much that she is identified with her friends who vandalized the palace. This is a different palace, this is a palace which is full of artobjects on the surface, but has this torture chamber into which the well-known Italian writer is dragged, seduced, and overpowered. So, the attack is on you, as a father, by seduction, yes, vandalizing his penis. . . . JSM: However, I happen to be an intimate friend of this writer and she possibly knows it . . . DM: . . . possibly, yes. JSM: So this seems to confirm your view of the dream: she is imprisoning me in her foul, secret rectum, fouling my penis-thought, and again, it seems, aiming at me as the father-soldier who interprets in the transference and threatens her to show her the truth about her secret thoughts and all that she has been doing in secret, in the secret basement. So she seems to warn me not to speak about it ever again, not to reveal what the soldier has seen, otherwise she would torture me and confine me in a mental hospital, I would think. DM: Quite, quite . . . JSM: The fat woman seemed to me a pseudo-passive part of the whole sadistic scene, colluding . . . DM: . . . well, that is again the mother, I think, who doesn’t pay any attention to what goes on between her and the father, being so busy in feeding the baby, that she doesn’t pay any attention to this masturbatory activity going on in her genitals and her seductiveness toward the father. It’s a mother so preoccupied with feeding the baby and so satisfied with it that she is in a state of wavering identification, like she herself and her daughter, completely locked into this idealized feeding situation. JSM: I also suggested to her that “Clare, the faithful servant, who, being blind, was your memory . . .” – “. . . yes, she’s blind but can see extraordinary things . . .” – “. . . seems to me to be your good maternal analyst who, though blind about your secret thoughts and feelings, being behind you and ‘tortured’ with all your twists and turns of the way you told me about those dreams, nevertheless protects your memory as a child, your good sensitive feelings and thoughts, protecting you from being seduced down into the basement of the palace, defacing your father’s penis.” She listened very carefully and really seemed to have accepted it. DM: A good way to express to a patient when a good object is presented in a way that it is also a debilitated object is that these are the conditions that she

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exacts for her love and respect: that you must be old, you must be blind, you must be ill, and so on . . . then she can love and respect you. Hard conditions, you see . . . JSM: Yes . . . such is the tribute one has to pay to partially lift the iron hand of omnipotence, while at the same time placating the strength of envy and competitiveness . . . But I took it in the transference, suggesting that Claremother-analyst, though blind for being really behind her, that is, not really being inside her mind, being therefore incapable of seeing anything if only she forgets her dreams, and tortures me by jumbling her narratives, and yet seeing “extraordinary things”; I am her memory also in the sense of “trying to show to you that you may be setting on fire and defenestrating all the beautiful art-objects that you have – the really caring efforts and thoughts of Clare-mother-analyst down into the awful basement-anus-mental hospital of the ‘Crazy Place’ inside which you still seem to ravel living in, into your anal-torture chamber, full of diarrhea instead of the art-objects, the ugly place you mentioned the other day, the quarter in which little girls get pregnant from drug-addicted and delinquent people, making all these objects ugly, trying to lovingly shield a budding sense of enigma beginning perhaps to take some shape in your mind.” DM: That seems to be the immediate situation, yes; that her affect and dependence on you has this kind of Clare-mummy which here seems established. And yet, she is preoccupied with how to demolish you as this arrogant daddy who thinks his penis is so famous that he knows everything. JSM: The driving of the car . . . DM: Yes. JSM: And yet ambiguously, I believe, since he is merely her driver, as she put it. DM: No, she is trying to debase you into it. JSM: Oh I see . . . She has to be in control . . . she cannot tolerate the “wellknown” analyst-Italian writer . . . The next session she reported another dream. She dreamed of a van full of children inside which she saw her daughter and a foam-baby. In her dream, this “foam-baby” has just been sent to her by a woman friend who has also lived in the “Crazy Place” while Sophie was living there. In her dream, her friend had sent her this foam-baby from that place sounding like a package sent by mail. Sophie described this woman friend as “totally mad,” having no rules or limits whatsoever in what concerns her sexual life. “Besides . . . how strange . . . everything in her is false.” Her friend was described as being delighted about the “Crazy Place.” While living there, she used to tell Sophie, “I had sex with all kind of people, people of different races, different

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religious credos, with all kind of fellows, and orgies with everyone, and all this mixed up with drugs, and everything . . . ! How wonderful!” Sophie woke up from her dream in great anxiety, thinking: “I cannot possibly afford taking care of another baby!” So after many associations about her friend I suggested that in her forgotten dreams this split-friend part of herself, still relishing living in the “Crazy Place,” knowing no limits, no little wooden wicket-gates carefully closed by the good, concerning mother preventing her from crashing herself down the dangerous stairs, this “Crazy Place” where all barriers have just been blown up, the Sophie who refuses to comply to any rules and any limits, seems to have made this foambaby with analyst-daddy’s penis in a mad triumph, though afterward realizing that “all in her being false,” refusing to be divided between these two opposed parts of yourself: the one who is the mother of your daughter, and the other ruling the basement of the Spanish Embassy, full of beautiful pieces on the first floor, but an awful unruled anal world armed with daddy’s defaced penis ruling the tortures and all the brutalities you have watched in the film. DM: Well, it may be so, but again, the evidence isn’t there, the immediate evidence suggests that she is very worried about her daughter. Her daughter seems to her to be like this house in the Spanish square . . . that her daughter has this beautiful perfection on the surface, but she is worried that the way in which she was made, the kind of intercourse in which she was made, has resulted in her having these two different levels; an underneath level, a secret level of perversion, you see . . . which also implies that she is very worried about how she herself was made, and what kind of intercourse produced her. Let’s go on and see what happens . . . it’s very interesting. JSM: You’ll soon see all that you say, I think! . . . But would you tell her this about her being worried with the way her daughter was made? DM: Yes. JSM: How would you word it? DM: I would say: “You seem to be worried, there is more to your daughter than the surface of being good, and perfect, and clever, and beautiful. Like yourself, you seem worried whether she also has an underneath of something hellish and perverse . . .” JSM: So this time you would have commented directly on the content of her dream and not interpret it in the transference. DM: Well, eventually you’ll get to the transference, but depressive feelings almost always approach on the flank, by way of the children, and the anxiety to what

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they have done to their children . . . yes . . . you will get to the transference . . . but one has to follow the material to get to it; if you try to make a shortcut, it turns out to be misleading and a dead end. JSM: I see . . . Now a man, a tender, old friend who has always had a sort of maternal relationship with her, a sort of eunuch who for many years used to kindly accompany her everywhere [“I couldn’t step into my home without being accompanied by him; I couldn’t get to sleep without having a word with him over the telephone,” etc.] – this odd friend is now, however, going to marry. Sophie is terribly anxious about this. Having of course been invited to the wedding, she is hesitating whether she would be at it. The night his friend told her that he was going to marry she dreamed that she was walking by the seaside with his future wife, Rachel, whom Sophie knows for years. – “She’s just sinister. In my dream, I was going to marry her sister, called Carmo, who nonetheless was also my boy-friend, I don’t know how . . . both man and woman . . . I was very anxious because, on the one hand, Rachel scares me very much, but on the other hand, I wished so much to be there in an intimate relationship with my old, tender friend. I must see him. . . .” “Carmo” is my wife’s name, and she must know it because of indirect social links. This is the first time that this shows up in her analysis. DM: The first time . . . JSM: Yes. Among the many associations she made, she told me that she used to walk by the sea side in exactly the same place where she used to walk when she arrived from the “Crazy Place” in a ruin. – “One of these days I suddenly thought that Carmo is a motherly name . . . I like so much its music . . . I had never thought of that before.” Now, as I told her how, when she feels abandoned or lost, during the breaks in her analysis, she confuses her need for protection with her need for a penis . . . – “. . . yes . . .” – she said. – “In those occasions I just throw a handful of men in the air and pick up one at random . . . it really doesn’t matter who I choose.” DM: “A handful of men” . . . it doesn’t matter what finger, you see . . . The moment that she feels any distress, she immediately masturbates not to allow herself any conscious experience of distress; it all goes into her dreams. She masturbates it right into her dream. JSM: You mean a masturbatory phantasy experience in her dreams, or do you actually mean the concrete use of her fingers? DM: When she says: “I really throw in the air a handful of men,” I would tell her: “Yes, you do the same now with men as you did as a little girl with your hands and fingers. You enact your childish masturbatory phantasies.” . . .

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JSM: . . . so immediately getting inside mother feeling soothed by omnipotence and triumph. . . . DM: . . . yes. JSM: . . . feeling “protected,” therefore . . . So I went on: “The ‘sinister Rachel’ seems to stand for my wife . . .” – and she laughed excitedly – “. . . who is all the time threatening to deprive you of my protective penis.” DM: This dream, I think, is about her realizing of the danger of the mummy and daddy coming together in a sexual union. This implies that daddy isn’t just her driver, her chauffeur; that mummy isn’t just her maid, her old-blind-maid. It implies that mummy and daddy have a relationship with one another, and this threatens her terribly. She doesn’t know why it threatens her, but she feels panic. And the panic is that maybe she suspects she isn’t in control of everything and everybody. It threatens her omnipotence and her triumph, and it panics her. And the thought that you have a wife, and that you have children, and that your Carmo wife is a motherly wife to your children and a lover for you, it just explodes her. She cannot tolerate such an idea because it reduces her to dependence, to having to say “please” and “thank you,” and to have to wait during separations, hoping that nothing terrible happens to you, that the whole world becomes a place of uneasiness, you see. That’s a very crucial dream. Rachel’s lover had been represented as a kind of worshipful penis, always hanging around, never demanding any kind of sex with her, just prepared to serve her; a devoted chauffeur. Now, this chauffeur-penis, daddy-penis, wants to marry the Clare-mummy . . . JSM: “The sweet Rachel,” as Sophie’s close friends who also are close to Rachel, use to call her. DM: . . . and we are now going to see the end of all her sweetness . . . Right! Good! JSM: I also suggested that Rachel seems to stand for the fat, repulsive woman of the Spanish Embassy . . . DM: Well, there is nothing explicitly sinister about that fat woman in the Spanish Embassy dream. JSM: She told me “she is fat and repulsive” . . . DM: Yes, but not sinister. “She is fat and repulsive” means sexually unattractive, but there is nothing sinister about her. You’ve got to be a little bit more careful to keep the categories separated from one another, otherwise your own phantasy runs away and it takes off from the material. I mean, it has a certain basis, but it also flies around.

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JSM: What seems to me quite sinister in this woman was once again conveyed to me in the music of Sophie’s voice when she described her at the Embassy. This woman sounded quite comfortable about watching the underground people dragging the Italian writer down into that dark, labyrinthic mental hospital, confining him there by force. There was a tone of repulsion and indignation about her; she colluded with them; she was described as being part of the sinister gang. DM: She seems unconcerned about it. JSM: That’s exactly what makes her sinister; she watches all that and yet remained just unconcerned about it, suggesting a sort of a “fat,” indolent, repulsive collusion, as just being a pawn in this awful gang, I think, the butcher’s complying woman. I distinctly heard it in Sophie’s voice. This woman seemed conniving with all the other rulers of this really sinister basement. She now is Rachel as well as my wife Carmo. DM: Yes! yes! . . . But here, I mean, is the way a child who’s appalled at mummy coming down for breakfast the next day, after having sexual intercourse with daddy, and it seems that the butter wouldn’t melt in her daughter’s mouth, and the child is enraged that mummy is so indifferent about these horrible things she heard during the night . . . (now mimicking an enraged child protesting about something incomprehensible to the mother) “mummy . . . how awful . . .” JSM: Oh, I see! “Mummy, how awful! . . .”, yes . . . Now I see! – “On the other hand” – I still suggested – “the sinister Rachel seems to stand for the part of yourself who still lives in the ‘Crazy Place’ by interfering between you and your friend. You still seem to fly back to ‘the Crazy Place’ as soon as you ‘feel abandoned’, as you use to put it” – “I know very well that there is something in me who does not yet want to leave the ‘Crazy Place’ back. I still become so excited when I see anything in the news concerning it . . .” DM: Yes . . . She is still a masturbating girl . . . and this handful of penises is still her retreat from reality. JSM: “I also realize” – she went on – “that my daughter’s perfection was all built by myself. I awfully needed it in order not to get mad.” – “As if she has been the angel, created by you, who never let you sink into The Garden of Earthly Delights.”1 – “It’s exactly so! . . . I often gaze at her, in silence, as though she really was an angel. My family praise her all the time . . . they are all completely stupid! They don’t understand that this was all done by me . . . But this is now coming to an end: she now utters slang words at home, she recalcitrates with me, etc.” DM: Ok . . .

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JSM: Why do you say “Ok”? DM: Well, the labyrinth of the Spanish Embassy is beginning to reveal itself; and the parents don’t see it, but she sees it. She knows very well that she has, with her idealizations, induced her daughter into this splitting of conscious and unconscious, and to keep all of her masturbation phantasies secret. How old is Charlotte now? JSM: Eleven. DM: Eleven . . . the approaching puberty is beginning to emerge . . . and she is feeling guilty about it . . . JSM: Yes! Deadly guilty, I think . . . DM: Because it’s the secrecy that has made it so bad . . . It’s not the badness that has made the secrecy; the secrecy has made the badness; and this is important . . . it’s important to make it clear to her, that, by inducing the secrecy, she has made it all being bad, and evil, and sinister, you see. JSM: And she now seems to come closer to what you said about her beginning to be very anxious not knowing where in her mind Charlotte has been made: was she made in the basement of the Spanish Embassy? Where exactly was she made? DM: Quite. JSM: Her sudden: “They are all stupid!” seems directed at me but . . . DM: . . . probably, yes, meaning that you haven’t evidence to show her about Charlotte having a labyrinthic part just like herself . . . JSM: But this leads her back once again to her sense of triumph, I would think. For she added: “They don’t understand that this was all done by me.” DM: Yes. But you wouldn’t need evidence other than this foam-baby dream, you see; but then she would say, when you interpret to her now: “You should have told me that years ago!” And it’s probably true that you should have challenged her idealization of her daughter. JSM: . . . which I actually did, time and time again, describing Charlotte-in-hermind, many times, as the perfect child of a perfect incestuous liaison, and . . . DM: . . . she didn’t listen to you . . .

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JSM: I would think that she somehow did listen to me. Otherwise this rich material may have never emerged now and her anxiety about the nature of her daughter and the nature of her relationship with all her so-called perfection might have never been in doubt. Anyway, she now begins to say that her daughter utters slang words, and recalcitrates, and so on. And Sophie herself now begins to realize her dependence on her daughter and begins to be worried about it, even saying: – “Charlotte is a limb of my body. I feel completely lost when she separates from me, I am much more dependent on her than she is on me.” DM: That’s all right, but that doesn’t involve an understanding of her daughter having a sinister side of her personality . . . A sinister because it’s so secret . . . and others in her family, joining in the idealization, are stupid not to see it . . . That you have not seen that, or she doesn’t realize that you have seen that . . . All you have seen is that she and her daughter are in a folie à deux with one another, but you haven’t made it clear to her that this is an alliance of witches, really. JSM: I don’t feel that there has been an alliance of witches between them; nor have I seen signs of a folie à deux. I mean, Charlotte does not seem to collude with her mother, still less with her grand-parents, and even less with her siblings. She seems astonishingly autonomous from her mother’s serious difficulties. DM: She feels that she has involved her daughter in something that is fundamentally sinister because it hides the truth. JSM: In Sophie’s mind, of course! Not in her daughter’s mind, I think. All Sophie’s scornfully laughing at all those who thought she and her ex-husband formed a perfect couple, and so on, yes. But this does not mean seeing Charlotte herself colluding with her, I would think. DM: She now begins to realize that the issue of secrecy is very important . . . of the untruth of it, you see. JSM: “Now, for the first time, I deeply missed you.” She told me that a woman friend has arrived from a distant country in an acute psychotic state. Sophie was deeply impressed with this and reviewed, terrified, her own mad stay in the “Crazy Place” and the state of ruin she was when she arrived back in Lisbon. Her father had a very serious car accident. After some time in the emergency room, first life-threatened and immediately afterward with permanent disability, he decided to move to the country where he was born and lived and worked before marrying and moving permanently to Portugal – “I joined him and I alone looked after him for all the time the long, sometimes painful treatments took place. I spent my days in the hospital being with him as long as I was allowed to. He eagerly waited for me to visit him every day and didn’t stop talking to me from the first to the very

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last second of each day about his life, his past dreams, his idols, his fears. He dried me up to my last bone!” Gradually, however, her father recovered really very well. Another operation was still needed, however, this time it was a relatively minor surgery. And yet, Sophie felt her father particularly anxious about it and could not understand why he was so upset, after all he had gone so successfully through. After this comparatively minor surgery, he again recovered, and soon afterward went back to Lisbon. Just before leaving, however, Sophie asked him why he was so anxious about this last surgery – “Do you really want me to tell you?” – her father asked her – “Of course, I would like to understand. Then he told me that there was a rather remote risk for him to become impotent. I was terribly shocked . . . Why was he worried about becoming impotent?!?! Do they still have any sexual relations?! With my mother?! With this rag?!” – she said, really shocked. One morning, however, shortly after this episode, Sophie suddenly woke up in tears, and cried and cried for days and weeks. Then, her long, rather painful tour of psychiatrists and analysts began – “That very morning I started insulting my ex-husband with all coarse words I knew, scorning and humiliating him, day and night. This lasted for about two years. I made him crawl behind me like a shivering, impotent, old dog.” She scattered her long description with endless shouting: “He’s a beast!!” – then adding: “One day I came for a week in Lisbon but had to go back again for I had no place to stay here. I did feel that there was no place in this world for me any more . . . suddenly everything lost its sense . . .” – “I would think that then everything may perhaps have begun to make sense: your former life, your marriage, your relationship with your daughter, your nightmares, your colics, your unending warring with your mother. For the moment your father ‘died away’ from your phantasy of his really being your golden god and, in the concreteness of your phantasy, your daughter’s real father, and when you suddenly found out that your mother and he do love each other, you began insulting your ex-husband . . .” – “. . . oh yes . . . I never realized that before; I really began insulting him that very morning” – she now said, thoughtfully – “. . . and I still need him for this very purpose, to continue insulting him.” JSM: Once again she erupted in fury with her ex-husband. I suggested that her rage against her ex-husband seems to be due to her definite finding that “. . . your daughter is, in fact, though not in your phantasy, both yours and your ex-husband’s, not your father’s, this being an unbearable disappointment to you.” DM: Now, again, a question of understanding. This is probably not the expression of rage but of sadism, that is, of pleasure in cruelty. JSM: What I distinctly heard was rage, madly infuriated explosion of uncontained rage for seeing, all in a sudden, her life-long triumph and ideal about the origin of her daughter coming from Zeus’s golden penis she alone truly possessed being suddenly crashed in pieces. Sadism comes next, I think.

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DM: Well, it is the underside of love, when the ambivalence of love is kept secret and split, when the ambivalence of love is relegated to the unconscious, and is not together, the love and the hate have been split apart. And when that happens, the secrecy turns it into sadism. Now, the sadism is not committed in rage, it’s only a pleasure to inflict pain, but it is a pleasure that is enacted in compliance with the demands of the masochist, it is sado-masochism. What she is complaining about is the masochism of her ex-husband, who is not only submitted to this, but is revelled in it. And her father, while portraying being the victim, was relishing, full of self-pity, was being the masochist, and involving her, seducing her into being the sadist, and enjoying watching him being tortured; again the torture chamber in the basement of the Spanish Embassy, you see. This is very important because it throws light on the difficulty of being a therapist confronted with sado-masochism in a patient. I mean, if you seem to tolerate it, you’re accused of enjoying it; if you are patient you’re accused of enjoyment. If you lose your temper, you’re accused of wanting to be beaten more violently. When confronted with masochism, there is hardly anything you can do except to penetrate into the meaning of the masochism. Now, the meaning of the masochism always turns out to be the killing of mother’s babies. She is a late and only pregnancy, isn’t it? JSM: Yes. DM: But there was a miscarriage after her. JSM: There seems to have been a miscarriage after her which she seems fairly sure of, possibly two miscarriages, she is not sure. She still vividly recalls a strange turmoil at home; a muffled buzz with people hastening across the house to and fro, while she, still being very little, having been forbidden to see her mother, but clearly understanding that something serious was going on. Besides, she seems persuaded of having heard rumors about her mother having suffered a few miscarriages also before having had her. DM: One has to think of the way in which her mother’s miscarriages intensifies her babies’ omnipotent destructiveness. It’s the masochism that you have to go after. Her father’s masochism, her husband’s masochism, and what she feels is your masochism in putting up with this abuse, and feeling so sorry for yourself about it, and complaining: “You treat me like a dog!” . . . JSM: I don’t feel like complaining of anything; I’m describing for her what I think she is actually doing and feeling, and I am telling her this in her own terms: I’m employing her own terminology, the very terms she herself used, time and again, to describe how she actually felt she has treated her ex-husband – “like a dog crawling behind me . . . ,” and she knows very well what I mean. But my comment about her ex-husband is again out of the point, you think?

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DM: No, I mean . . . a reasonable point to make is that she is puzzled with his putting up with this for so long and, on the one hand she would like to think: “Oh, it’s because he loves me so much,” but she suspects that it is really masochism, that he submitted voluptuously to being treated this way. JSM: I suggested: “In the last three years, your ex-husband has been playing a negative role.” – “How is that?” – “Because all your rage and arrogance really aim at me though you are still acting it out on him, using him to pore it out, thus impoverishing your analysis, hiding away all that fury in your carefully forgotten dreams instead of allowing . . .” DM: . . . one of the things that you also have to avoid, in analysing a situation of sado-masochism, is the language of exaggeration, of emotional exaggeration. Words like “great,” “fury,” “destruction,” and things of that sort in order to make it clear that we’re dealing with a masturbating child, who is an impotent creature, and seeking to keep a sense of omnipotence going against all the facts of life in the outside world that challenge it. JSM: And yet, thinking omnipotently, experiencing things in the form of omnipotent phantasies, and indeed deeply disturbing people and feelings and things all around her, to describe what she does and thinks and says demands a proportionate measure . . . DM: . . . yes, but one has to avoid the sort of language that tends to be treating it as if it were something huge and powerful and immense and so on in reality. JSM: But it is huge and powerful and immense in reality. DM: Yes. And yet, one way you may do it is to stick to a kind of baby talk, you see. So you talk about these naughty feelings, and feeling cross, and so on; the kind of language that applies to children, “naughty child,” and “cross,” and “stamping your foot,” and so on. JSM: But there seems to be a kind of paradox. For on the one hand all this seems to go on, in her psychic reality, at a very primitive level, at a very babyish level, and yet, she is indeed capable of doing a huge harm in external reality. DM: But this is not the language to address her. She is actually capable of doing a great harm to real people, as you said, but the language we should use should be the language of her psychic reality, and this is really very primitive. Otherwise you may confuse her even further. JSM: I see . . . and yet it’s difficult to follow you in this . . . Well, she then went on: – “In fact” – she said thoughtfully – “yesterday, when I left the session, I had

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the feeling that I was actually insulting you . . . but it’s absurd to do it for I have but reasons to be grateful to you, in every hour of my life . . .” But I still told her that she also seems to have good reasons to feel furious about me and to wish so much “to make me crawl behind you like an old, silly dog just like you often said about your ex-husband. So you feel madly furious about me because I put an end to each session, because of the week-ends during which you can’t stand imagining that I’m making babies to my wife, that is, that I see other patients without asking your permission . . .” – “. . . yes! Without asking my permission . . .” – she said, smiling – “So the omnipotent and triumphant Sophie now has to comply to all this, and in the end, you still have to pay me” – “Oh yes! . . . On the top of it I still pay you!” – “It is me who should pay you, of course” – and she again laughed gently in agreement . . . DM: Yes . . . insulted, injured, yes . . . (smiling) . . . So, again, you can see it’s being hypertrophied situation is coming down into the playroom, the nursery, the naughtiness of children, the omnipotence of children, and so on. JSM: Yes . . . now I begin to see, yes . . . The next session she arrived fifteen minutes late, and said: “I’m sorry . . . I had to remain longer at the University . . . I was working with a colleague who was helping me . . . he’s such a nice man . . .” – “May I ask you what do you exactly mean by ‘I had to’?” – “I don’t know very well . . . he always supports me in all those hostile meetings . . . I thought I shouldn’t leave the meeting sooner . . . well . . . perhaps I lingered there on my behalf, not on his.” DM: Well, it’s a problem of displaced gratitude. I mean, it’s all very well for her to feel grateful for this man for supporting her in her meetings but it’s not right for her to take the gratitude she feels to you and to pay it to him. I often say to patients that: “You know, you’re like somebody who gets rescued from drowning, and immediately falls on her knees and say ‘thank god!’” . . . JSM: . . . and then you said: “Hey! What about me?!” . . . (laughs!). DM: Yes, yes . . . hey! What about me?! (both laughing!). JSM: Yes, you’ve told us this little excellent story! I have been spreading it everywhere! “When I feel more fragile I’m unable to take care of myself and harm myself without being able to stop. I began to arrive here at my hour because, one day, you have raised the issue.” – “And yet, you again made me wait for you.” – “What’s wrong about that? I still pay you! It’s better for you if I don’t come at all, I pay you anyway. I’ll spare you from fifteen minutes of annoyance and still pay you for that free time!” . . .

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DM: “Now you’re being a stupid child, who doesn’t understand anything about my position, and doesn’t realize that you are insulting me,” I would tell her. Stupid child, you see . . . JSM: Well, I didn’t call her stupid child but told her . . . DM: . . . but it’s a good word: stupid child . . . I would tell her: “You have no idea that you are insulting me at this very moment. As you recently told me, you sometimes think: ‘Oh, sometimes I wonder if I’m insulting him’ . . . So you are insulting me at this very moment. You do not realize what I am doing here with you, what does this means to me, and what investment I put into it, and to what vulnerability I expose myself to . . . you have no idea, really . . . you think that I’m just your servant, your chauffeur, etc.” And this is the way of the aristocracy . . . you don’t know anything about how the peasants live, except that you have a strong suspicion that the peasants are happy, and the aristocrats are miserable. JSM: Yes, yes . . . Absolutely true . . . Shockingly true . . . Well, I told her: “You are wrong. The sessions with you as well as with all other people I see begin for me exactly at their hour. And if they don’t show up, I immediately notice it and begin to be worried about them, wondering what happened, maybe you are struggling with some further difficulty; perhaps I missed something in the previous session . . .” DM: Well, again, you have to be careful not to become the mother who’s complaining: “Oh, I was so worried about you, you ought to phone when you’re going to be late. You have to be considerate of your poor old mother, who gets so worried about you . . .” (all laugh!) You have to be careful. It’s enough to say: “You seem to have no idea of my position.” JSM: Is that enough? You yourself have just sequenced a number of sensible points: the investment I do put into her analysis and on her; the vulnerability you are exposed to . . . , so also complaining about her naughtiness, about how much she makes you suffer . . . Don’t I have to explain to her the nature of her not understanding; what she is really failing to understand? . . . DM: Oh, no. “You don’t understand me.” Children do not understand the adults, they cannot understand the adult mentality until they are adults themselves and begin to have adult experiences. JSM: I still told her: “It now seems that you deeply resent the slightest break of attention you sometimes feel that I have with you . . .” – “. . . it’s true! The more I feel fragile, the more I need all the attention – just only all the attention is good enough for me; otherwise I break off in revolt. Now I’m not coming here the whole summer, isn’t it?” – “. . . and so baby Sophie soils her nappies in rage and

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resentment foisting it on me by being fifteen minutes late, saying: “. . . but I’m doing you a favour! I’m sparing you fifteen minutes of annoyance and I pay you for being spared fifteen minutes of annoyance, perhaps meaning ‘I should rather find a better protective penis which will always support me when I feel in ruin and who bought me a warm coat, being unable to bear being in want of anything . . .’ ” – “. . . that has always been my foremost worry about Charlotte: never ever let her feel in want of anything! Even before she felt the need of anything I should absolutely always be already there, forestalling her suffering the need of anything. This was often commented on by all my close friends . . . I had never seen anyone behaving like that with a baby, in fact . . .” – “You seem to feel that I’m turning my eyes away from you . . .” She suddenly interrupted me saying, this time in a serious, pondered tone of voice: – “The question of the eyes is crucial . . . it was crucial for me to continuously gaze at my daughter. I spent hours, sometimes days gazing at her. My friends said how odd this seemed to them . . . I may have harmed her in many ways, but there is at least one fear that she will never have: that I wasn’t there when she felt the need of something.” DM: That’s the one bit of praise that you get from her: that’s that you’re always right there, ready to interpret . . . (laughter) JSM: Yes . . . And yet I wonder if this is not another echo of the point you made about the pain inherent in the shift of the key object of transference from the placenta to the breast, shifting from the feeling of being permanently there, as the placenta actually provides the baby with, though not the breast, when she decided to miss a session that happened to be in her birthday. Besides, I feel she is right: we really are close to summer break. And this is perhaps why she now feels that it is a burden for me to see her. She seems to feel that I am already driving my eyes away from her. DM: But she said (reads): “Before she felt the need of anything I was always already there, forestalling her suffering the need of it.” JSM: Just like the placenta, as you said. Besides, I agree with her: the question of the eyes seems to be keenly translated into the qualities of the music of the voice which you again commented on a year ago. DM: The point here, I think, is your being too keen in explaining to her all that you understand. JSM: Yes . . . Counter-transference, I fear. . . . She then went on: “Last night I had an awful dream. I was in a room with two other people but I can’t recall whom they were. The floor was made of large stones. I was walking up and down the room. Suddenly, I noticed that some menstrual blood has fallen on the floor. I felt terribly anxious and tried to clean it up, but the two persons that were there

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said [to one another?]: ‘Yes . . . we already saw it . . . now it’s no use trying to clean it away.’” DM: Now we are getting to mother’s miscarriages. She’s calling it menstrual blood. JSM: Yes . . . Then she recalled the two dreams she had the previous Saturday. – “In the first, I called one of my cousins asking her how was her child [in fact her cousin had a baby] but she replied [Sophie now voiced it in a gloomy tone]: ‘I’m again pregnant . . . I’m going to have twins . . .’” – and Sophie repeated this, impressed – “The other day I saw in a super-market twin children . . . they were monsters . . . I was terribly impressed . . . the mother didn’t have enough money to buy them food . . . I was shocked . . . perhaps I saw in her something of myself . . . poor mother” – she said, in what sounded to me a true pain. I suggested to her that this seemed to me all about her mother’s miscarriages as well as about her fears of being herself “miscarried” in her analysis, as she now seemed to have glanced back at her whole life as well as about the holiday break. And I wonder if the two people in the room whom she could not identify do not refer to her mother’s two other miscarried babies she heard the rumor about. DM: Probably. JSM: In the second, she dreamed about the wedding of her life-long, very close and tender friend who recently married Rachel. Although at first she hesitated whether she would attend the wedding, she finally decided to be there though in a manic state, taking control of the party, becoming the center of the wedding, having managed to turn everybody’s attention away from the newly married couple and on herself, which she is certainly an expert in doing. This, however, was merely the theme of her dream though not the dream itself which she did not recall. DM: Yes . . . Well, things are really going along at a cracking pace now. She is already really discovering the transference, discovering her attachment to you as both mummy and daddy, that as a couple you’re represented by yourself and your wife. That the weekends are becoming fraught for her, that she is getting worried about being replaced by a new baby. Things are really hitting up, and taking shape with her. It does suggest that either there’s going to be a great move forward or a great explosion. Nothing much happened over Easter in the way of explosion, but you have to be very careful about the coming summer holiday. Characteristically, at this point, the summer holiday either gives an opportunity for a great move forward in the analysis, or a great explosion if the patient can’t tolerate it. And the preparation for it is terribly important, if you prepare it weeks in advance, while still on your eyes, week after week. And she is a girl who needs a lot of preparation. If you don’t focus on it, she will distract you with all sorts of

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things, and prevent you from preparing her for the holidays. You certainly have got to the threshold of the depressive position with her, but you have to remember that this a very explosive situation. Very good! Lovely! . . .

Note 1. Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Early Delights, which opens and closes the first edition of Meltzer’s The Claustrum, 1992, was invoked by Meltzer as a particularly telling representation of the three worlds the internal mother is concretely experienced to be divided into by the parts of the self-intruding into it and “really” living in projective identification: the head-breast world, the vaginal world, and the rectal world. Values and ways of thinking deeply differ from one of these worlds to the other, though profound confusion seems to be the predominating feeling, just as in Bosch’s triptych. The triptych is some times invoked by Sophie to refer to these internal worlds of the internal mother.

CHAPTER 9 “JSM: Do you take notes of the sessions you think are important? DM: Oh no, I take notes on every session. JSM: On every session of every patient? DM: On every session of every patient. JSM: Seeing fourteen patients a day . . .”

Summary The meaning of masochism in psychic reality is again described to be defeatingly complex. It is seen here as “a powerful defence against the terrible possessive jealousy of the space inside the mother.” As said before, its ultimately meaning is believed to be “the killing of babies inside the mother.” Neither of these qualities, however, accounts for the way the sadistic side inherent in masochism seems to operate with the masochistic side of masochism. The connections between these combined parts of perversion is in itself thought to be what masochism proper ultimately consists of. This complex understanding of masochism is shown at work in the clinical material presented below. The chapter also shows how egocentricity may be degraded into sadomasochism. An intense counter-transferential response to the analysand’ s egocentricity took the form of a panic attack. This is described and discussed in this chapter.

JSM: The day before she learnt that a cousin of hers had committed suicide. This is a cousin from another branch of her family. The young man who commited suicide was gifted, though very depressed, who was in treatment with a psychiatrist. He killed himself by taking a large amount of prescribed pills. That day she got such a violent headache, became absolutely convinced that she herself was going to die that very day and was taken by a real panic. I do not recall her having ever complained of a headache – “When I fetched Charlotte at school I had to share

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my affliction with the housekeeper and then told my daughter, in the car, that I was perhaps going to die that very day. Already at home, I called [her very close friend who is a doctor and has recently married]. He was very kind and talked to me quietly over the telephone, prescribed two aspirins, and my headache slowly vanished. I was terribly ashamed about this; nothing similar has ever happened to me before.” DM: This is an illustration of her immense egocentricity. Her cousin commits suicide, and she is obsessed with the thought that she is going to die this very day. And she even tells her child, thus projecting the anxiety into her. It’s an immense egocentricity, really. She narcissistically identifies with the cousin immediately. Everybody has to worry about her. I mean, “he is dead already, there is no use worrying about him; worry about me! I’m going to die!” JSM: I suggested that she might have felt identified with her cousin because of her feeling profoundly guilty for having all her life burnt out her family support, as well as my own support by often forgetting her dreams. So you seem to have thought: “What would have happened to me if only I had not been in analysis?” DM: Right! But the main thing is her egocentricity. JSM: Yes, I was just about to directly address that issue when I myself began to feel increasingly anxious, my cardiac rhythm suddenly dashed, I felt I was going to have a heart attack, but nevertheless decided to wait until the end of the session whatever it could cost me. However, as the time elapsed, my anxiety grew so much that in the last minutes I became convinced that I was just going to die right there. I noticed, however, that although I put a tremendous effort not to allow out the slightest change in the tone of my voice that could betray what was happening with me so that not to disturb her in any way, my voice did slightly change. I also tried, this time successfully, to stand it right until the very end of her session so as not to take a minute off her time. However, as soon as the time was over, I must somehow have hastened her to the door. After the session I checked my blood-pressure which was quite normal and my cardiac rhythm quickly slowed down to a normal rate. DM: (expressing some kind of worry through a short onomatopoeic expression) So there is a really . . . you know . . . a big counter-transference response that should help you to understand the egocentricity of her hypochondriacal reaction. JSM: Yes . . . What is worrying you? It was my mistake having such a countertransferential response to her egocentricity? DM: Oh nooo! no! I’m . . . I’m . . . very irritated with her; well, egocentricity is always irritating, you see. Someone commits suicide and she immediately asks

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(now mimicking the voice of an irritating spoiled little girl): “hei! what about me?! Other people commit suicide, after all!” . . . It’s very irritating . . . very irritating . . . always saying “what about me?! – what about me?!” JSM: She now looked terribly depressed . . . DM: . . . good! . . . JSM: “I slept awfully and feel really ill.”– she began to say. Charlotte is already well. DM: . . . yeeees . . . JSM: What you mean by your musical yeeees . . . ? DM: Unreciprocal relation . . . Charlotte recovered . . . JSM: Another cousin of her, she now told me, brother of the one who has just commited suicide, hanged himself at home when he was just 12. “They both were called João” – and she smiled, sadly, so it sounded to me. Then she told me about still another cousin who had also commited suicide: “He cut himself in bits, opened the gas at home also intending to kill his two sons. The elder son, however, sensed the smell of the gas, noticed the opened gas, succeeded in shutting it just in time, but then they found their father laying on the floor, already dead, in that quite unspeakable state.” I suggested that she was perhaps describing how she felt because of imagining that I could have suddenly died. “Ah . . .” – she said – “I thought of it before: what if he dies? . . . Last Saturday I dreamed of my sado-masochist ex-lover. It was a pleasant dream, but I can’t recall it now.” I suggested, nonetheless, that it might have been a typical masturbatory dream: like a baby, who tries to sooth herself by sucking her thumb back into her mother when the mother suddenly disappears from the reach of his perceptual abilities, she might have used, in her dream, her ex-lover’s penis exactly with the same purpose, because baby-Sophie has perhaps felt my rushing to the door at the end of the last session as well as a change in my voice as an indication that . . . – “. . . indeed! I felt just poured out! I thought: what happened?!” He had perhaps to rush to the toilet . . . I went back to the terrible anxiety of the baby-Sophie lest she might be poured out from her mother’s care and warmth and eyes permanently focusing on her. Now it seems to have made sense to her that by putting it inside her, her ex-lover’s penis could immediately sooth all her anxieties. DM: Unfortunately, you don’t have the dream, but you can be pretty sure what this pleasant dream was. It was essentially a masochistic dream in which all of the suicides have turned into murders and her sado-masochist ex-lover is the murderer.

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The egocentricity has turned around into masochism, and she becomes identified with the murdered baby, and you are the one who murdered her by ending the hour. So, the masochistic sexuality has the meaning of “baby is being killed” . . . In her self-pity and self-concern, she is the baby who’s being killed. But in her masochism, she really enjoys being the object of the sadism. JSM: It is really amazing the depth of her egocentricity and the defeating complexity in which the three vertices – egocentricity, sadism, and masochism – seem so actively interwoven! DM: It is, yes. JSM: She puts herself as the baby in the center of the scene, and everyone focus on nothing but “ending up her session,” foisting cruelty on her. She converted the suicides . . . DM: . . . the whole issue about these suicide cousins is wiped away in favor of herself as the baby who is being killed by you in your rushing her out of the mother’s body, flushing her out of mother’s body; mother’s miscarriages and things of that sort, you see. But this is the structure of sado-masochistic sexuality. The girl is inside mummy’s bottom, receiving daddy’s penis unbeknownst to the mother. But what she doesn’t realize is that this penis is a sadistic penis, that has come in there to kill the baby. So you have this split between the Oedipal triumph over the mother, of getting the father’s penis, and also the persecutory anxiety of being the baby who is killed, and being the baby’s mother who allows it to happen. It’s very complicated, really . . . very complicated . . . It’s not complicated for the sadism. The sadist goes around women and killing their babies. It’s just his sadism. But for the masochist it’s complicated because he has all of this double identification. JSM: And all this is essentially staged inside the mother; it’s amazing, really! DM: . . . possession of its space, but also killing the babies. The problem of sadomasochism is that the masochist is always both, the sadist and the masochist, and it is a reversible relationship. It is a powerful defence against this terribly possessive jealousy of the space inside the mother. JSM: Concerning her endless rage directed at her ex-husband – though I do not know whether this is the right word to describe what seems to emerge as such –; her terrible need to despise and humiliate him, I suggested: “. . . as though you suddenly had to spit ‘that thing’ violently out – your husband as a limp penis together at once out of your body and of your mind as if you would now experience it as something filthy.”– “Precisely . . . to take ‘this thing’ off me . . .” – she said, thoughtfully. – “Worse than that” – she then added, in the same

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thoughtful tone – “I can’t possibly bear seeing my mother and my ex-husband interfering in my relationship with my daughter.” – “. . . the moment you realized that your father was not Charlotte’s father; that her father is, in fact, your exhusband. This is confirmed every time I have to change an hour in your schedule or go for holidays as again now, only to make more babies with my wife. You still must cling to the phantasy that your daughter is the perfect baby of the perfect incestuous couple.” DM: Now, of course all of that is a tenable theory about her origins, but it doesn’t describe the transference. I mean, the significant thing about the transference is that you had a panic attack; you ended the session slightly prematurely; she felt picked out, and the situation is a hot-transference situation, of her feeling that you cannot bear to have her inside you, the feeling that she is killing you. JSM: Oh yes! . . . the transferential consequences of my panic attack are still far from being clarified, yes! She missed the first two sessions of the next week because she was abroad on duty. “Last Friday [a holiday she wasn’t reminded of] I had a strange dream but can’t recall it now. It was a very disturbing dream . . . I wrote it down . . .” – “Why didn’t you read it today?” – “I forgot to read it right before living for my session and forgot bringing the piece of paper on which I has written the dream down.” DM: Hum-hum . . . JSL: Why do you say “Hum-hum”? DM: Well, she is forgetting; it’s being held in her memory; it’s the masturbation phantasy aspect of her dreams and her acting out that she is not remembering. JSM: She told me about a bitter discussion involving her ex-husband and a few other friends. “I suddenly realized that I was defending him heartily and felt very surprised. When I was at last alone, I even felt tenderness toward him, poor David” – she said, tenderly – “I even noticed that I was longing for him, and was so surprised! . . . I don’t remember having ever felt this in ten years.” DM: This is a typical attitude of siblings (now mimicking a little possessive girl): “I protect my brother, no one can hit him except me!” JSM: . . . but it sounds as if having some sexual undertones. DM: Well, it’s both possession and it has a sado-masochistic quality of the relationship. “When I hit my brother, it’s lovemaking, when somebody else hits him it’s sadism.”

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JSM: (laughs) . . . you will see! In her fury against one of the friends involved in this bitter disagreement, she said: “If there is anything wrong about David it’s me alone who is entitled to mention it!” DM: Right, right . . . JSM: However, I first suggested that some of her shouting at the friend of her exhusband seemed to be aimed at me. It seems to refer to the nightmare of last Friday, because of my “astounding attitude” of imposing on her a holiday she was not aware of – “So you wrote down your dream but ‘forgot’ to read it right before coming to your session, and then also ‘forgot’ to bring it with you to make quite clear who is in charge here.” – “I very much use that strategy outside here, in fact . . .” – she said, a little surprised. DM: . . . one has to concentrate on getting the geography [of her emotional experiences and phantasies] right. Because, while the geography is wrong, there is no way of knowing her because it’s a different world, really. JSM: The next session she looked shattered. She had awful dreams all these days. Friday was the worse of all. She dreamed that there was a terrible earthquake in Lisbon, that the whole town was in an awful ruin, and that she was walking through the ruins with her sado-masochist ex-lover. Saturday morning she felt ill and thought that she has no way out save to be confined to a mental hospital. That night she dreamed that my consulting-room has changed. There was a woman at a desk, in white uniform, who told her: “Now it’s me whom you should talk to.” That woman had a watch. I felt terribly confused and asked her: “But ‘Jag’ is João Sousa Monteiro?” – “No . . .” – she answered, in a sadistic voice – “I can’t tell you whom it refers to . . . you are confusing him with your father.” – “But how?” – “I can’t tell you because your time is over now.” This, then, was her dream. She made many associations, plainly showing, I would believe, how deeply hurt and betrayed by me she felt, saying: “I can’t trust anyone anymore but my parents. I’m very much afraid that they may die. Everything would then lose its sense. I need them alive.” – “You seem hurt and mistrustful about me, I believe, and I can’t immediately see why.” – “The last session we talked about my exhusband and you said that my feelings about him were but an expression of gratitude toward you. Everything I say is always referring to you. That’s a way of exercising power over me. I can’t understand that. For the first time in ten years I have such feelings toward him and you say that he doesn’t exist, that’s all about you! You know how important it would be for me to pacify my relations with him: should I succeed in doing it, my entire life would be pacified as well.” Then she said, this time in a nice, quiet tone: “I like you very much. I know that I’m very much dependent on you, but I also like other people as well; I like my father very much for what he really is.”

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DM: “Now listen here, mother! . . . You mustn’t assume that, because you’re my mother, you’re so important in my life! You were important in the past, but then you weaned me and it’s your fault if I turned to daddy. And now it’s other people who are important, so just stay in the background; don’t you keep pushing yourself forward . . . You have lost all of your importance to me when you pushed me out one minute early . . . You then weaned me, forcefully, and now there’s no possibility of my trusting you.” Language is so ambiguous, that any patient can turn it against you. Even without distorting what you say, they can certainly distort the meaning of what you say . . . and you’re helpless about it. JSM: I did not end her session a minute earlier. I was very careful not to do it. It’s her hour. What, however, was unfortunately worse than that was the change in my tone of voice, and my hasting her to the door at the end of the session. Although she said she thought I was rushing to the toilet, the real effect on her seem now visible: she must have taken it as yet another miscarriage. Her mother had hasted her out of her body. She was already an unbearable foetus. The blood in the floor of a former dream. Her mother’s expelling her out of time . . . Richard III, the crippled. And then the sado-masochism fuelled by her egocentricity, feeling wounded, again a bit like Richard III. DM: Yes, yes . . . JSM: She called me Wednesday evening asking me whether I could change the hour of Friday session. I agreed in changing it. DM: What was the reason? JSM: I didn’t ask her. I assumed that if she asked for a change, she should have some serious reason for doing so and if I can change it, I would of course change it. DM: Well, I think that you should always ask the reason, and not be “on order,” as it were. I mean, if it’s a matter of pleasure or social occasion, I would say no. If it’s a matter of an obligation, a prior obligation, I would consider it. If it’s an emergency, of course. JSM: I feel it a little bit intrusive of me to ask her why over the telephone . . . would you tell her: “If you want to go to the beach . . .”? DM: You’re always free to go and come as you please, but I don’t have to agree with you. JSM: And would you tell her this over the telephone?

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DM: Yes. “You don’t need my permission except to offer you another session. That you need me to agree with. But if I don’t agree with it, I don’t offer you another session, but you’re always free to miss your session. You might regret it, you might not, we’ll see.” JSM: I see. I offered her another hour, and when she came to this new hour she told me that, in that very morning, she took the decision to quit her office. Since the beginning of her analysis she occasionally alluded to her wish to leave her other job, at this office, because, she always puts: “I’m not well treated there.” And yet, all her descriptions have lavishly shown the exact opposite of what she says – “Now, everything is clear to me. I can quit this job. I took this decision without even consulting my father, which otherwise I would have done. I also took another decision – to call my sado-masochist ex-lover, who is a liar and is lying to me all the time, and leave him a message saying: ‘I won’t stand any more lies from you. You have your life, and it’s better that you don’t call me anymore.’” She felt very relieved with all this, and added: “I hope that I don’t go back to my fears of abandoning the office. I thought of it as I came back from summer holydays, but now I have decided to do it, now.” DM: That doesn’t tell us anything why did she want to change her hour . . . JSM: Indeed . . . DM: You’re supposed to forget that? JSM: Certainly not but I again didn’t ask her, and now think I don’t need to. For I suggested to her that because I haven’t asked her for her reason to want me to change her hour I seem to once again feed her triumphant decision to just quit her office as well as to fire her sado-masochist ex-lover. DM: You’re gonna turn into this poor dog-husband just driving after her. You have to be careful with this girl, that she doesn’t get you jumping and sitting up and begging, keeping her fifteen minutes longer being trained by her. There’s one of my patients who dreamed that she’s driving her husband’s car, and there’s a big dog in the passenger’s seat who she has trained to sit up . . . She is acting out the impulse, which she has told you in the previous session, to stop her analysis. But she has given you a chance: “Now, I won’t leave if you be obedient,” none of this business of weaning her by hasting her out to go the toilet. JSM: I really resist asking unauthorized questions, that is, outside the setting. But now I realize that this was part of the setting. But I might perhaps formulate it by telling her, over the telephone, that if there is a serious reason to change your hour I would attempt to change it, otherwise I would rather not do it – and then wait

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for her reaction. Then, already within her time, yes, I would raise the issue back, which I actually failed to do. DM: Things are coming to a crisis with her. And the crisis is about her sadomasochism and her relationship with her sado-masochist ex-lover and her treachery toward her friend. She’s terribly egocentric. She is living in a different world, really, a world lacking in ethics, where everybody is scrambling to survive, and it’s a rotten world to live in. If she comes out of that, you’ll get to know her and you’ll find a different person, but at present, like anybody who lives in projective identification, she is either frightened or she is treacherous betraying everybody in order to survive. JSM: Do you believe that these feelings that she had about her ex-husband, of tenderness, even longing for him and protecting him, have some truth, some sincerity in them? DM: Oh yes. She is thinking: “Oh . . . when I used to live outside [the claustrum], I felt such and such for him. Perhaps I could live outside again, and then I would have such feelings.” But it also means: “I’m not really having an analysis, I’m training João to be an obedient analyst, and threatening him always that if he doesn’t obey I will leave him . . . and that’s not the right way to have an analysis . . . He’s been very patient, he’s been very faithful, he’s been working hard . . . If I think about it in that way, I could feel quite tenderly toward him . . . But when I think about him as someone who has power over me, I really hate him . . . and I’m just waiting to have revenge on him.” JSM: What did you mean, the other session, by: “preparing her for the summer holiday”? DM: Well, she’s getting ready to leave analysis. JSM: I don’t feel she’s ready to leave at all. DM: Well, she is always ready to leave, and she is really tooling up for it, provoking a border incident between her and yourself, and she’ll declare war and you’ll be shot. (Reads) “I like you very much, and I know that I am very much dependent on you, but I also like other people as well . . . I like my father very much, for what he really is,” and so on. You mustn’t think that you are important to her: “I don’t think that I’m important to you. I think that you have a transference relation with me, and that transference relationship is important to you . . . I don’t think that you know me at all, really . . . I don’t think that you are interested in me as a person.” JSM: Her arriving late . . .

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DM: . . . it’s a problem for analysis, and you have to expect that it could take a long time to find out anything about it. If it’s just occasionally I’d wait to find some evidence about its current meaning. I’m not much in favor of this business about hoping about it, insisting . . . “Why are you late?” It’s too disciplinary. Whenever you evoke obedience from a patient, you’re finished, really. It ceases to be a parental relationship and becomes a tyrannical one. I always try to end on time. If a patient comes early, I don’t make him wait, if I’m free. I see him early and end the hour early. The trouble is that if they come late, by the time that you look at your watch you have gone over . . . you have an inside clock. JSM: Do you have any breaks between patients? DM: Well, I have five minutes between patients, that’s enough to write my notes, and so on. JSM: You don’t agree with the procedure of seeing patients without any interval between them? DM: Well, on Wednesdays my schedule is a little peculiar because I don’t have any gap between three patients in the afternoon. They hate it. The couch is still warm, they see the other patient . . . they hate it, really. I will change that after the summer. That’s a mistake, really. I knew it was a mistake, but I didn’t realize that they would hate it quite as much as they do. JSM: Do you take notes of the sessions when you think it’s important? DM: Oh no, I take notes on every session. During those five minutes, the dreams in particular, and the general theme of the session. JSM: On every session of every patient? DM: On every session of every patient. It only takes a minute or two really, and that bit of condensation seems very important. JSM: . . . seeing fourteen patients a day . . .

CHAPTER 10 “I can’t come [to the session], I feel it . . . I’m a piece of shit . . . I’ll come as soon as I feel human . . .”

Summary Sophie’s analysis exploded in a new crisis. Life in the claustrum, when this is the internal mother’s anal world, is believed to lead to the epitome of perversion. Unusually clear evidence of the phenomenology of this type of perversion is described below. It nevertheless seemed possible for her to take steps out of this personality structure. This progress surfaced in the form of what appeared to be real affectionate feelings and in her constant oscillation between being inside and outside the claustrum. This state of swaying in and out was described by her as feeling “. . . deeply confused about myself . . . I don’t have a picture of myself as everybody does . . . I don’t really know who I am.” A particularly important piece of evidence of her being sometimes outside the claustrum and in some genuine emotional contact with the world was her occasional sharp awareness of her own troubled condition.

JSM: When I last reported on Sophie her analysis had again come to a crisis. She had been furious with me for months for reasons discussed before and now she openly threats to leave analysis as you said before. She now told me that she had a very acute colic during the previous week-end because having deliberately eaten what she knows she shouldn’t. – “The previous Friday I asked you for a change of an hour because I wished to attend a baptism.” I accepted to change her hour without asking her what was the reason for her asking it – “At the last minute, however, I felt no desire to attend the baptism for my daughter might feel abandoned at home; she might have needed me to help her with her studies [which in fact didn’t happen either].” – “Your colic seems

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the consequence of my having yielded to your pressures, first because I have allowed myself to exceed the time of the last three sessions, second because I was really upset when I thought that I have hurt you with my interpretations and apologized. I have also been yielding to your pressures over these changes as well as for seeing no reason why I shouldn’t yield to your wishes as for instance to change an hour of a particular day without asking you the reason why did you wish me to change that hour presuming, unfortunately wrongly, that if you asked me for a change you should have an important reason for doing so. Then you felt lost, because I bent to your omnipotent wishes, saying, however, that it was your daughter who could feel abandoned, etc. . . . So I again obeyed to you.” DM: Right . . . That’s a very good summary. JSM: The next session she arrived twenty-five minutes late and gave no explanation for being late – “You told me that I do harm Charlotte and I would like if you could tell me exactly how because I can’t understand it and this is important to me.” Although I first tried to tell her what I meant, I soon realized that this would again lead straight into yet another useless uproar, and told her, instead, that she was madly furious with me because I was going to leave for holidays” – and she suddenly laughed, sincerely, I felt, and I continued: “. . . and you seemed desperate to submit me, to make me bend down to your will and to your orders” – and she again laughed, this time in surprise, and, I think, in acknowledgement – “. . . expecting me to kneel in awe at you, and if I don’t, you would again try to get me mad by ensnaring me in yet another dispute . . .” – she laughed again, this time unequivocally in agreement – “. . . which is another desperate way to try to dominate me.” – “But why should I wish to dominate you?!” – laughing again, this time kindly, I think – “Because I impose quite a number of rules on you and you feel it unbearable: you are the one who must always be in control; and also because I’m leaving for holidays without humbling asking your permission for doing so; because I’m telling you, for almost a year now, a number of things that you do not want to listen to from anyone whomsoever; because I’m all the time re-building all the fences you always try to blow up in your relationship with me, so I’m a dirty, stupid, pig, or whatever you might wish to word it.” – “Yes . . .” – she said, this time in a quiet, thoughtful tone. – “I have already thought all that . . . But how do I wish to dominate you?” – “For instance, in arriving twentyfive minutes late and not saying a word about that.” – “I was ill!” – “Suffering from what?” – “From a food intoxication” – “How did you get it?” – “By eating some plums.” – “How can a plum cause a food intoxication?” – “Because” – she said, now lowering her voice, and phrasing it in a quite reluctant tone – “I washed them in dirty water . . . deliberately . . .” – “You see how did you wish to poison me and to blow up your analysis as a way of bending your father down to his knees!!?” – “I must conceal what I did from my friends . . . they couldn’t possibly understand how did I get such a violent intoxication by just having some plums.”

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DM: (long silence) . . . yes . . . This is really very good; you’ve worked very hard for her in bringing things together, in making it clear that you consider that she has a very bad relationship with you. That she treats you as a figure of this world that she inhabits in which it’s either dominate or being dominated; there is no alternative. This is the nature of that world; it is a political world, a world of tyranny and submission; if you don’t tyrannize me you have to submit . . . and, of course, she comes late for analysis because, in fact, she doesn’t value it. JSM: Next session she arrived at her hour. She was upset about the school she should choose for her daughter. There were two possibilities. “One, which is only ten minutes walking from home, but it is horrible, degraded, the kids look terribly provocative; they smoke; the kids smoke, you see . . .” – she repeated, in a frightened, indignant tone. – “The other school is much smaller, much warmer. It really looks much better in every sense, except that it would take her fifteen minutes by bus from home.” Sophie herself has made the route by bus to get sure about every detail of the way from home to school and back home. Every one she asked for advice – which would before be just unthinkable for her, to ask anyone advice about her untouchable daughter – were in favor of the second school. I asked her what was Charlotte’s own inclination. She too preferred the smaller school. A sharp doubt still prevailed in her mind, however. “What if she gets a pain in her belly?” – meaning, what if she would need to rush to the toilet with a diarrhea. “Should she be in the first school she would be able to reach home quickly . . .” Charlotte, however, has never suffered from colic or diarrheas. I showed her how deeply confused with Charlotte she was. . . . DM: Right! JSM: “Yes . . . I think so.” – Sophie said – “But please help me to disentangle this. I really wish to choose her the best school.” – “You seem very much afraid should you get a colic during holidays, so you seem to feel the need to stay closer to your toilet-mother, and seem to also feel afraid of being again confused with the people in the dangerous street of the ‘Crazy Place’ you told me the other day, being frightened to again feel identified with these drug addicted, prostitutes, criminals, etc.” I also suggested that her feeling appalled about the larger school seems to result from her seeing that school very much like the space inside which her nightmares usually take place, “so you seem to be referring to your terrible fears lest Charlotte – the innocent, unstained part of you, the only part of you who leaves outside the ‘Crazy Place’ where you seemed to have enjoyed traveling by tube late at night, all alone, though realizing the danger of doing it – lest the innocent part of you could be definitely caught inside the ‘Garden of Early Delight’, dragging you definitively into insanity.”

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DM: That’s very good . . . that’s really very, very good . . . because you’re showing her the world she lives in, and her fear of dragging Charlotte into that world . . . Good! JSM: She then dreamed that next morning she was going to leave with her parents to the north of the Country to a beautiful, peaceful country-house she loves very much, and meet some cousins and uncles of another family’s branch. In her dream, however, she was in a kind of a soviet parliament both as it looks today, with its terribly heavy, ugly, and obsessive architecture both outside and inside, and as it looked during the Soviet Revolution. The atmosphere inside the Parliament was one of a political uproar, typical of what one might imagine it would be the atmosphere of constant insurrection of the beginning of the twentieth century. – “I didn’t know how I got inside it. It looked sinister. Suddenly, I realized that the people sitting in the auditorium were there to judge all those in the galleries where I was. Gradually, the whole space within the Parliament turned into a concentration camp. Everybody in the dream was gradually losing control and I couldn’t get out of that space. I felt so terribly anguished that I really was right on the verge of calling my father for help” – and she repeated this last line many times. She did sound quite disturbed by this dream. I suggested that – “There seems to be three key-words in your dream: concentration camp, the space inside which you seem to be living, actually your state of mind, in which every single human value seems vandalized and perverted; the space inside which everybody was about losing control; and that you do not feel able to come out of that space unless you have the help of someone outside that space.” Then I tried to bring these three aspects of her nightmare together by showing her how simultaneously present they all seem to be in her mind, as well as partly in her everyday life: in her sudden bursts of fury in which she loses control without being at all conscious of it . . .” – “. . . no, no” – she said – “I’m conscious . . . ! I must be conscious . . . I must be very careful about that because I feel that otherwise I could become mad . . .” – “. . . just like the people who seem about to lose control in the Soviet Parliament, like your bursts of rage that emerged so often since you were already a baby [previous material] in the form of excruciating pains in your intestines and acute digestive troubles . . .” – “. . . yes . . . I recently recalled how I suffered from colic when I was just a little girl . . .” – “. . . these bursts of rage which appeared, still today, in the form of nightmares in which you restore the phantasy of being the only object of ‘god’s attention’, being ruler of the Soviet Parliament having the unfailing right and absolute control over daddy’s golden penis-inside-mother’s-rectum. This, I think, is all done in an atmosphere of terrible insurrection inside the Soviet Parliament of your dream.” She recognized, sincerely, I think, the total destruction of values inside the “Soviet Parliament” of her dream, when she’s in that state of mind. DM: Now, in the telling of the dream, she makes it quite clear that it’s this state of mind that she slips into when her parents go away, when anybody leaves her without permission.

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JSM: I told her that, yes . . . I told her exactly that. And yet, it seems rather puzzling because she was going with her parents. During holidays, her parents, Charlotte and Sophie were leaving together . . . And yet, during the night before they left, she had this nightmare, clearly mirroring, nevertheless, the internal space she seems to concretely living in projective identification, I would think. DM: Whose idea was it to go together to the north? Whose plan was it that they should go there? JSM: Her parents’, I think, but I’m not sure . . . DM: But it’s enough . . . without her permission, you see. And that’s it. She is a tyrant. And when she isn’t tyrannizing and ruling everything and everybody, then she feels like one of these people in the gallery who are being judged, and being subjected to god knows what. So, that is very important: without her permission. She is the kind of baby for whom everything in the household must be determined by her needs and, therefore, with her permission. JSM: . . . yes . . . talking control of my way of doing things in my consultingroom; talking control of her ex-husband’s mother’s household; talking control of her father’s meeting with women friends of her, and so on and so forth. DM: Yes; and there is no such thing as a routine or an experience that isn’t determined by her intestine. “I’m hungry or I have to defecate,” and the world is to be ruled by these parameters, her hunger and her need to defecate. Now, the problem of how she gets into this Soviet Parliament is, of course, the interesting question. I mean, she has done it all her life, by something that has been eventually promiscuity, but was originally masturbation, and it’s now called doing things on purpose, deliberately . . . the point is deliberately, which is a reference to the masturbation. In my opinion, when you’re confronted with this sort of situation, analysis is impossible. You have to wait to be in a position to analyse them and, in the meantime, you can affect their mental state in certain ways . . . and what you need to aim at is, first of all, to undermine this sense of omnipotence. Here you have a perfect opportunity to show her the way in which she is preparing Charlotte for omnipotence, by treating her the way she treated this little child of four, seeing him like a little god [left out material]. And, second of all, to emphasize how trapped she is in this state of mind, and she doesn’t know how to get out of it, and she wants you to tell her how to get out of it. And I would emphasize that there is no use telling her how to get out of it because she knows perfectly well how to get out of it . . . and the way to get out of it, is to go back the way she came into it. And how did she come into it? By getting your finger up your bottom, that’s how you get into it. JSM: Literally, you mean? By putting her finger up her bottom?

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DM: Literally, crawling up mummy’s bottom, absolutely literally, into this rectumsoviet-parliament; mother’s rectum, ruled by the shit-penises of the soviet parliament. JSM: In her dream, the people in the auditorium were there to judge the people on the gallery. DM: It does have a very strong resemblance to the outside world of politics, which is almost entirely an area in which nobody tells the truth, and everybody tyrannizes those ‘below’; and the poor people submit. JSM: Nevertheless, she was extremely pleased because, during holidays, she was able to have pure orange juice every morning, in fast, without the slightest digestive upset. – “This never happened to me before and all my life I ‘dreamed’ to have pure orange juice in the morning.” I was surprised with the music of her voice, really sounding like a charmed child’s voice, recalling the delightful moments of her early infancy, without any pressure or persecution, as if dreaming of a loving time. DM: But it also means: once you spent a night in the Soviet Parliament, it’s so lovely to wake up and to have pure orange juice. She gives you an idea that she is in and out now, that she can be out in the daytime and in at night. JSM: Very much so, I would think, for on the one hand, her voice and joy did really sound to me as if she was just saying: “Ay! the outside world again! With pure orange juice, and really nice people everywhere, loving me, not knowing where I have just been! Nobody persecuting me!” But the next session she added, still referring to the dream of the Soviet Parliament, that “people were all coming out full of shit, stenching terribly.” DM: If she would be honest over the telephone, she’d said: “I can’t come, I feel it, I’m a piece of shit . . . I’ll come as soon as I feel human . . .” JSM: The next session she said: “I had many other nightmares during holidays but they have all stopped one week before coming here. I even created a whole session, in one of these dreams, and afterwards could clearly recall all my questions and all your answers. Perhaps I needed so much to come here . . . I remember that that session, in my dream, demanded such a lot of work from me. I also dreamed of the very sinister colleague of mine who, in the dream, did me so much harm and was so wicked . . . she let me down. I’m very much afraid of her. The other nightmares were all about war . . . weapons everywhere . . . in one of these other dreams, while I was in a hearing before the secret police who interrogated me, they took Charlotte away from me . . .” – “All those dreams seem to refer to all the phantasies, doubts, uncertainties which crowd a baby’s mind the moment

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the mother leaves the baby suddenly alone, as I did to you when I left for holidays: ‘What is she doing?! Why doesn’t she come?! Is she playing joyfully with other babies, giving them all her love and care, being so wicked to me that she can even let me fall down?! Aaaah! Yeeees!. Surely she is making babies with daddy!’ On the other hand” – I still continued – “the jealous little Sophie, facing similar burning questions concerning the missing father: ‘Is he making love to my mother, forgetting me so cruelly?! Is he dead?!’ – “. . . yes! Exactly like that! . . . yes! I also dreamed of a good, very tender friend of mine. She had to have an abortion [in real life] because her child was abnormal. She went to the hospital but was so awfully treated there! . . . I think that she had to have other abortions . . . ! In my dream, I was so upset about her that, the next day I could hardly refrain from calling her at home just to make sure that she is alive . . . Then, I just happened to meet her in the street! I felt so happy! How intensely and joyfully I greeted her! I didn’t tell her about my dream, of course . . . So we immediately arranged to meet again the following week . . .” At this point, however, though she continued her report, the music of her voice turned suddenly gloomy: – “I have also thought of your death . . . because death exists, isn’t it? . . . I don’t know why I’m not having nightmares anymore by now.” – “Because, I think, you are still not quite sure whether, during holidays, I have not aborted you as an abnormal baby just to have other, new more interesting babies. And also because you were just about calling daddy to rescue you out of the Soviet Parliament and this is what I am trying to do here with you: trying to help you out of the filthy place, inside mother, where you have been living. Besides, I believe, you were also in doubt whether I, standing for daddy, were not in fact making love to mummy during your hour, enjoying being with her instead of seeing you as promised, being, in fact, waiting for you, at your hour, as I said I would, thinking of you, in spite of your silence about whether or not you would come. So you said you would leave a message but didn’t, so much you seemed convinced that I was betraying you with mummy, this being why I think you didn’t leave any message, to show up without warning. – ‘Were you waiting for me?’, you asked, even from the outside hall. – ‘Where you waiting for me instead of being with your wife, making new babies and aborting me?’; this, I believe, is why you didn’t show up and didn’t say anything. Now you are sure that I didn’t lie to you.” DM: That’s very, very good. You’re really pulling things together for her very, very well. Good!

CHAPTER 11 The fecal nature of the devil

Summary This chapter investigates important aspects of the connections between sadomasochism and anality. Occasionally Meltzer builds bridges between the strictly clinical realm and fundamental aspects of Culture. “Christianity turned it [anality] into the original sin.” NB: Beginning of the fourth year of analysis and the third of supervision.

JSM: “Last Saturday I dreamed that a boy, perhaps a friend of Charlotte, came into my house and I invited him to see my baby, who was in my room. As he entered the room, I left for a minute, perhaps to go to the toilet. When I came back the sheet was full of semen and I found the baby mixed up with all that filth.” The previous week-end she met three women friends of her who, in fact, were all pregnant. They talked a lot together about pregnancies – “Isabel, who has lost her first baby, lost a lot of blood with him. I don’t have the faintest idea of what really happens, physically, to a woman who loses her baby.” I suggested that her dream seemed to refer to her infantile fears of miscarriages, both as her mother’s baby, and as little Sophie being the mother of her new baby – “Furthermore, your dream seems about your infantile confusion between a baby and a penis, both stolen from your mother’s inside; between daddy’s ejaculation and you becoming pregnant.” This led her to say, through various associations: “When I was pregnant I was so proud of my huuuuuuge belly. When, however, now I met these three pregnant friends of mine, I noticed that I was the only one who had really been so proud of having had such a belly . . . I looked like a cow . . . I used to stick my belly even further than I already had it . . . my body weight increased by about

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20 kg, and I simply refused to make any diet as everybody does . . .” – “The question” – I suggested – “seems to be who was the father of your baby, and what age were you when you got pregnant of that specific baby, in the concrete reality of your mind.” She clearly got what I meant, obviously suggesting that she had experienced her pregnancy as if her baby was, in the truth of her psychic reality, daddy’s, and said: “But I was still less conscious of that by then . . . I think I even exhibited my belly! . . . yes . . . I think my father really treats Charlotte as his daughter . . .” DM: (silence) Yes, she is getting there . . . JSM: The next session she left a message saying that she wouldn’t come because Charlotte asked her to study with her exactly at the hour of her session. The following session was all about her having cancelled the previous session. It became still clearer how unbearable it would be for her if only Charlotte didn’t reach the perfect marks. “She got 100%, of course . . . she knew already the entire subject-matter. People who would get no more than 99% wouldn’t simply exist for my father.” At the end of the session she suddenly put the question why has she decided to linger abroad, in the “Crazy Place,” for about two long hellish years. She now told me that one of the many psychiatrists she saw before coming for analysis with me suggested that she did it to pay a fuller attention to Charlotte. However, as she said this, her voice went strangely dull: “Can you understand me?” – “No, and I don’t think you can understand yourself either.” – “Yes [she laughed gently]. Suddenly, I can’t understand.” – “Because I don’t think you lingered in the “Crazy Place” to give a fuller attention to Charlotte but rather to keep, “very eagerly, all for yourself, daddy’s precious baby. ‘I even exhibited my belly . . . ; I was so proud of my incestuous belly,’ I repeated for her” – “Yes . . . Now I really think that Charlotte is my father’s daughter.” DM: Yes, it certainly looks as if she is living this infantile delusion. What she says is that “everything that isn’t perfect is feces for my father”. JSM: Yes . . . being human is a filth; only being god counts – “The other day I dreamed that I would really like to present Albert [her sado-masochist ex-lover] to my mother but I couldn’t. They couldn’t be put together . . . this is psychotic; two separate parts of me which can not be put together . . . ! I have to hide quite a lot of things from my parents. I can only show them a small part of what I really am – “As you have just been doing with me one more time.” . . . DM: . . . quite . . . JSM: . . . “This is really insane. In what concerns my father it’s still worse. I must be utterly careful to pick up only what I imagine he would like to see . . . I live

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in secrecy. This is why I cannot possibly have a serious relation with a man. My family is still more important . . . even vital . . . What man shouldn’t possibly disappoint him?” – “None whomever because the only possible man for you is your daddy-Zeus. All other men would disappoint you yourself. You seem bound to live with a god and believe you deserve nothing less than that.” – “I’m terrified lest they find out my secret life. Should they find it, they will never love me again. I really can’t make the bridge [between Albert and her parents]. If only my parents come to know him I would lose something vital for me. I don’t want them to know him and I don’t want him to know them. I need to protect myself from still another threat: I’m sure that the moment he would enter my parents’ home, he would immediately seduce every woman he could meet there.” DM: This is her explanation; it isn’t true, but it’s her explanation. The truth is that she would lose her omnipotence. JSM: Yes . . . “I need to protect myself from still another threat,” yes . . . The moment she would bring him to her parents’ house her great secret could fall; her mask could fall down . . . Losing her omnipotence, her triumphant reign could come to an end, she would lose everything, she imagines, and she would no longer know whom she really is, I feel. DM: She thinks that it’s her omnipotence that holds her together and keeps her from being mad. JSM: “And yet you feel lost if only he vanishes.” – I suggested – “Yes . . . I do” – she said, bewildered. DM: I mean, one has to realize how this fecal penis – the concept of the devil – has invaded the theology of the western world . . . ; the devil and witches and how everybody has believed in the power of evil. Christianity turned it into the original sin . . . which means everybody shits. Well, believe it, the devil is amazingly uninteresting. Faust is as boring as you can get because it’s all magic, it’s all leaving out the necessary steps in thinking. You just jump from A to C, and you leave B out, and that’s the devil, the way the devil pretends to think . . . very boring, really. JSM: She reported at once four dreams. “Thursday [the day she didn’t come because it was a holiday] I dreamed that I was in a basement with Charlotte, in one of my aunt’s home, and one of my cousins called me, saying: “Sophie! David is here, on the ground floor, to fetch Charlotte. Florence [David’s present wife] is pregnant.” I felt appalled with the news. In my dream, as I climbed the stairs, I really felt that I was going to faint.” The basement, in her dream, exists in fact but in her parents’ house where she lived all her childhood. Her many associations about this basement seemed to me to suggest that it was a place of promiscuity

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were there were no limits; no wicket-gates stopping little Sophie from thrusting herself down the dangerous stairs. DM: The important thing here is her conviction that Charlotte was conceived in the basement, in her rectum, you see. And here comes along Florence who was conceiving a baby in her vagina, upstairs . . . a shock for her! JSM: Friday she had two other dreams. In the second she was in an orgy with children and was in bed with a nine-year-old boy. “I wished to get out of that place but I couldn’t find my shoes. Then someone brought me an old pair of shoes which are in fact mine.” DM: Again, you see, the anal sexuality . . . because she loses track of her vagina and her vaginal sexuality represented by the shoes. It means that it has turned into this infantile sexuality, where the boy is supposed to be pouring out his semen, really peeing all over the baby. JSM: Her voice sounded strangely when, in her dream, she referred to the old pair of shoes, asking someone: “What’s this? I can’t recognize them? . . .” Her voice sounded as a mixture of uncanniness and perhaps repulsion. DM: Her identification with the mother, really . . . JSM: Striving to reach it, to find her way to a more mature sexuality, struggling to leave back her infantile confusion between mother’s anal world and her vaginal world, suddenly adding, as if just out of the blue: “I really want to change all my life”. DM: Yes. JSM: Concerning the dream of Thursday I suggested that “in the promiscuity of your basement-state-of-mind, in which there is no one to contain your omnipotence and your ravishing in your sense of triumph, you couldn’t possibly stop thinking that I, in the session you didn’t come, could have made a baby to my wife: Florence is now pregnant! It came as a bomb thrown at you, bursting in your hands, to realize that not only your father’s penis is not entirely yours, but your mother’s inside is also not dominated by you yourself.” DM: Why do you say: “Entirely yours”? JSM: Because of her sense of triumph; it cannot be shared with anyone in this whole world; it’s absolutely her own; Zeus’, its entirely her own; it’s god-like, not to be shared with humans, and absolutely not with her mother, this being quite central to uphold her sense of triumph . . . “entirely” in the sense that it is

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“unconditional hers,” again the sadly famous word unconditional. The last crime would be if he would share his golden penis with anyone, least of all her mother. This has always seemed to be her phantasy . . . Why do you ask? Do you think that there is some kind of counter-transferential problem here? DM: I don’t know . . . (silence . . .) . . . no, I think that . . . (silence) . . . it sounds good but its meaning isn’t so good . . . (silence). . . . No . . . Ok, this is a very good interpretation, yes – she is answering this call to come up out of the rectum, and to try to acknowledge the role of the vagina, and of the genuine penis. And to get away from this fecal penis and the omnipotence that it claims and all of that boredom . . . yes, yes . . . JSM: “However” – I went on – “at this point of your analysis, instead of bursting in diarrhea against me, you begin to climb the stairs, no matter how appalled, you keep on climbing it, really trying to be like mother, trying to really find out what means to be mother through your analysis, even if you at times may feel faint.” DM: Yes, that’s a very good interpretation. She’s really making an effort . . . very good! And how to get out of this basement? Well, to identify with her mother. Not to have to be unique, but to follow mother’s footsteps, in mother’s shoes, yes . . . Very good. JSM: The next session she said: “I dreamed that I was visiting a zoo with my father. Then, just around a corner, I saw two former school friends whom, however, showed up as two disgusting prostitutes. I felt so ashamed . . . They were dragging a corpse of a man inside a coffin. The man had his legs opened exhibiting a huge sex.” She then told me how uneasy she felt the previous night because she realized that she might have hurt Albert’s last wife badly and uselessly, just for a trifle. Their recent marriage lasted only four months during which he has made love to her several times. During a recent dinner with her family she felt silently accused by a friend who was at the table as if he was telling her: “You poisoned this woman uselessly and stupidly,” and she was filled with remorse. – “In arriving at home I watched my statement of account. It was surprisingly low. I never look at these things. I have always thought that my father should obviously supply for all my needs. I need something – he supplies it, as he himself has always persuaded me things are in life . . . he just fuelled this idea in me by all possible means endlessly. Now I have to put an end to all this. I have to provide for my own living. I have to leave the office. My father has always told me: “For you, even the very best is never enough . . .” Everything for me is just unconditionally. – “You just want to be sure that you absolutely dominate him, but he can’t possibly yield to you in that point . . .” – “. . . I accept money from him as a sort of a compensation for what I want from him and don’t have . . . it’s a sort of revenge.” – “And you are unable to understand that every time your father feeds your omnipotence, he probably does it in despair about your endless greediness

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and temper tantrums. It would seem that he loves you enormously and feels completely bewildered and helpless about your constant bursts of fury and anxiety and uneasiness, and gives you really everything he possibly can except himself; except changing your mother for you yourself, this being however what you most want from him. And “himself” means: your daughter is my daughter too; my penis is unconditionally yours of course. I obviously cannot possibly share it with anyone whomsoever, especially not with your mother. This is what “having himself” seems to mean for you. So you are always in want of the essential, not of his money.” – “That’s what he has taught me all his life!” – “That’s rather how the omnipotent and triumphant Sophie has always wished to listen, thus converting in triumph every single tender and loving attitude he seems to have been having toward you, I would believe. This is how you seem to have degraded your father’s passion and tenderness and endless generosity with you. You seem to have an important place in his life. Now look what you have been doing with all this. His golden penis!! – this seems what you reduce all this down to.” DM: Yes, that’s very good . . . That’s really very, very good. Of course, you don’t know how her father’s like. We don’t really know how he may have interfered with her when she has been a child . . . She doesn’t seem to claim that there was incest with her father. JSM: Not that I have ever noticed or indeed can possibly infer from all I have heard so far. On the contrary, everything seems to me to converge on the decent side of things, having always sounded to me as highly respectful and serious and really caring for her; and similarly about her mother, but I of course don’t know. But in all these years, I really couldn’t get a single note ringing anything out of the way, no. On the contrary, now, she also dreamed that she was climbing, in great effort, the rather steep street she has to walk every day in her way home from the university which, however, in her dream, is just the same she had in fact to walk every day on her way to her parents’ home from school during her childhood and adolescence. In her dream, at the top of the road, there was a man waiting for her. He was the driver of the bus of the school of her childhood. She felt breathless and thought she wouldn’t be able to reach the top of the road. Then she heard voices coming from the children in the bus, saying: “She won’t succeed; she won’t succeed [though not in a wicked tone, I felt; rather in a dramatic tone]. And indeed, I didn’t succeed. I could only climb the road up to where is a school for very forlorn children which actually exists in that same road. It was a really awful dream. It’s the picture of my life . . . I never succeeded in reaching anywhere. That dream is my true life . . . I never accomplished anything although I feign the contrary. Now I begin to understand people who commit suicide.” DM: So the climbing seems to be the theme at the moment. Climbing out of the basement.

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JSM: Yes, from the basement to the first floor, accepting Florence’s pregnancy . . . giving up omnipotence and the delusional idea of having Zeus-daddy’s golden penis unconditionally for her alone. DM: Yes . . . and these children on the bus don’t seem to be triumphant over her, they seem worried . . . worried . . . JSM: Yes, worried . . . as she herself clearly seems to be, worried, really not knowing whether she would find the strength to face, and really transform, all she has gradually been uncovering in her analysis. There was a tone of tragedy in her description of the voices coming from the bus. DM: She won’t succeed . . . She won’t succeed . . . Right . . . JSM: Well, I took this man waiting for her on the top of the road, as a . . . DM: . . . the old bus driver . . . JSM: . . . in the transference, for daddy-analyst, taking the children to a safe, sound, place; taking her from the basement-toilet, the father who would never give her his own penis, now that she is just again going on a holiday break, and yet never gives up helping her as far as he could but he himself too being worried. In the morning of the day she was supposed to have her first session after holidays she called me, asking: “Am I supposed to go today to my session?” Once in her session she told me: “I had very many dreams but decided to forget them all. Later, however, I began to feel very strangely as if I have lost contact with parts of myself.” – “Your throwing your dreams off seems to stand for your throwing me off your mind, enraged, in despair because baby-Sophie lost control of your suddenly vanishing mother, feeling a forlorn child who could not reach the top of the road suddenly made very steep indeed by Florence’s pregnancy. So baby-Sophie lost contact with parts of herself.” – “Yes . . . I real thought of it . . . it seems that I forgot my dreams deliberately because I felt abandoned during holidays.” – “That’s also why, I think, you called me this morning asking whether you were supposed to have your session: you have to regain contact with mother’s voice so as to bring all those parts of yourself back together again [I actually felt a strangely distant tone in her voice over the telephone].” – “You are right . . . I didn’t want to recall the day of resuming analysis in spite of your having told it to me twice . . . now I remember.” This led her back again to the very extreme care she has always put on Charlotte’s wishes: “I always succeeded in forestalling all her frustrations, so she had never had to cry out of want of anything. I fed her at the breast but as I hadn’t enough milk, I often let her have blood.” DM: What did she mean by that?

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JSM: She meant that Charlotte sucked her breast and, as the milk soon ended and Charlotte continued sucking, Charlotte got blood instead of milk. DM: And she allowed it? JSM: Apparently, even if in great pain, as I now, surprised, learned. DM: She made a sado-masochistic perversion even of feeding Charlotte, and she’s quite worried about Charlotte having involved her in this folie à deux of sadomasochism.

CHAPTER 121 “. . . worrying about your patient is terribly important . . . the only way we have of keeping the patients safe is to be worried about them.”

Summary The material discussed here is believed to shed a new light on the meaning of living, very concretely, in the internal mother’s anal world. Discussion of this material may hopefully equip us to better deal with this particular kind of pathology in the concreteness of the clinical hour. This discussion seems to allow a clearer reading of how the confusions inherent in perversions may at times invade everyday life, warping values and our views of the world. The new material also seems to lend further substance to Meltzer’s finding that “. . . being inside [the claustrum] invades their whole sensual experience of the world.” The links between secrecy and confusion gains a new light. Steps outside the claustrum are now registered. These first steps seem however to raise new challenges for both the analysand and the analyst. Another key point this chapter briefly emphasizes is the importance for the analyst to worry about his patients: “. . . worrying about your patient is terribly important . . . In fact, the only way we have of keeping the patients safe is to be worried about them. Because when we’re worried about them it’s always because they have evacuated into us their own worry, and we accept it, and not try to analyze it away . . .”

JSM: “While living in the ‘Crazy Place’ I used to travel by tube, alone, very late at night, without feeling afraid. I even felt attracted to it.” She was bewildered because there are still people who applaud her “courage” to do “such mad things.” I suggested that she seems to have all her life felt the drive to play the role of a hero, or the leader of a sort of a gang, “who desperately needs his believers’ applause still more, perhaps, than the believers’ need to submit to, and to be

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guided by, their leader, otherwise you would soon be faced with the unbearable reality of your deceitful omnipotence and triumph and might sink into depression.” DM: Right; I think it is quite true . . . yes. That sort of narcissism that she had, the narcissism of the game with her siblings and of being the leader, and so on, it’s very well stated, really. And of course it is connected with the world of projective identification. JSM: But I still continued, in direct connection with the end of the previous session with you: “. . . the leader risking to discover her omnipotence and arrogance looking like the huge penis of the corpse of your dream of the zoo with your father. Huuuuge – though of a corpse, coming out of the coffin.” DM: Right! Very good. JSM: “Yesterday I got really crazy. I very much needed you. Eva [a colleague of hers at the office] told me that she was going to quit the office, having insulted the president in such arrogant terms.” Sophie told me the terms of the charge levelled against her colleague. The sound of it was surprisingly similar to those loading Sophie’s language every time she explodes in such bursts of fury. – “Later the president of the office asked to see me and told me, very gently, that Eva had been fired; that she embezzled the office several times; her curriculum was a long list of lies, and so on and so forth. He also told me about her life: she has six children of three different men. They all live with her. One got AIDS, another is a full-blown psychotic, she lost all her previous working positions because she steals . . . Then he looked at me at some length in silence and said, in a slow, careful pace: ‘She’s crashing her whole life . . .’ I felt terribly anxious. I rushed to the telephone and begged Albert to talk to me. I felt so much the need to call my parents and tell them everything [about her secret life]. Then I went to Elisa’s home. She was with friends, so I shut myself up in the toilet and wept for hours, thinking all the time of David, talking with him in my thoughts. I lived moments of peace with him. As I told you last week I really feel so much the need to restore everything with him but he would think I went crazy.” DM: That is an important aspect of the coming out of the claustrum . . . the regret . . . the regret of what has been wasted while in the claustrum, the opportunities, time wasted, the waaaaaste of time . . . JSM: “Saturday morning I had such an awful colic for no palpable reason and went into another terrible panic because there was another meeting of the owners of the flats. I was really at the verge of calling you. Then I decided to call Albert but he didn’t wish to talk to me. As I went down the stairs to the basement where the meeting took place, I thought I really couldn’t stand it . . . that sinister basement . . . dark, wet, tight . . .” – “You may have felt the need to call me” –

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I suggested – “to make sure you wouldn’t get lost and mad, once again, inside ‘the sinister basement,’ dark and wet and tight, you had perhaps just begun to come out from . . .” – and I briefly reminded her of the sinister basement of the Spanish Embassy, of the basement which, though with great effort, she nevertheless succeeded in climbing the stairs up to the first floor when Florence was there, and so on. DM: The thing about the omnipotence is that it is part of the identification through projection that takes place. And it is the child who feels absolutely grown up; it’s that sort of omnipotence . . . (silence) . . . You’ve worked very well with her in that passage . . . the interpolation and the sort of dialogue the two of you were having it’s really very well done . . . (silence) . . . It’s probably necessary to introduce a little bit more of the transference, in terms of the despising of David and the despising of your cooking, your analytic cooking . . . The way mother is despised for not being a man, the contempt for femininity. JSM: Only two sessions later did I realise that I was, once again, missing the thread of the transference. Now, referring to the meeting in the basement with the owners of the other flats, she added: – “. . . it’s not so sinister as I at first feared it would be, but that’s the way I feel it now . . .” – “. . . meaning that I wouldn’t let you sink again inside the tube-late-at-night in the ‘Crazy Place’ which attracted you so much . . .” – “. . . yes . . . where I moved so much at ease, all alone . . .” – “. . . and from which you have already came out because only from the outside can you really see the meaning of your own inner life in Eva’s story.” – “I’m not at all sure that I’ve already came out of it . . .” – she quite wisely said, correcting my optimism and my real wish to see her out of all this and back to her life and her capacity to enjoy life and as well as her many talents. Then I told her about the mother’s anal world which she seemed to have dwelled in as represented by the “ ‘Crazy Place’-tube-at-night,” as well as the “sinister basement, dark, wet and tight,” about its contrast with her buying her own food and taking care of what she eats, which now clearly began to happen – “I’ve always spent a much longer time in the toilet [implying than in the kitchen] . . . it was David who cooked for me.” – “. . . this being the privileged place where your omnipotence seemed to root.” I suggested. She was really interested in what I was suggesting to her, and said: – “In fact, I never liked the kitchen; I never liked cooking until recently.” As this dialogue evolved about the confusion of the entrances of her body in connection with the inside of the mother, she said: “Only very, very late could I figure out the problem of my holes . . . it was all very much confused in my mind . . . perhaps it still is.” DM: Right! JSM: The next session she said: “I profoundly despise money and rich people and cars . . .” – “. . . and yet you use other’s freely and enjoy it.” – “Yes . . . I always

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thought that everything was owed to me . . . my father was literally a bank. I didn’t have to worry about money: I needed something – he signs a cheque, and that’s it . . . It has always been like that . . . money is made just to be put away . . .” – “Just like feces.” – “Yes, like feces, yes . . . it’s all part of my omnipotence . . . I’m above money . . . and I despise it . . .” – “. . . which seems to mean that you really fecalize it, fecalizing, therefore, your father and his work . . .” – “. . . it’s true . . .” – “. . . and this is a central aspect of the ‘Crazy Place’-tube-at-night.” But here again I missed the transferential meaning of this material. DM: Yes, it’s the fecal penis . . . JSM: . . . which she is referring to? DM: Yes . . . and the “Crazy Place” tube-at-night, as you said, with its violence. It’s also on the borders of dangerous slams, the black penises, the fecal penis. JSM: She now realizes, with surprise, what a strange world the “Crazy Place”tube-at-night really is – “Not one single male friend of mine ever dared to travel by tube in that place after 7 p.m.” And yet, she seemed ‘addicted’ to travel there after 10 p.m. or even 11 p.m. She really enjoyed it. Then she went back, really as if now confirming all that you have just said: – “I simply do not give a damn about where the money comes from: from my father; from my mother . . . don’t care! [Now referring to a large sum of money she would wish to spend with Charlotte] and if it would cost ten times more, I would spend ten times more . . . no limits for Charlotte! . . . But in fact this aimed to restore something in myself, I think.” – “Rather to perpetuate your full-fledged omnipotence and egocentricity, just confirming that, having “unconditional” control over daddy’s golden penis, you feel that there really are no limits for you in this world. You seem to be profoundly confused with Charlotte: for you yourself, no limits!” And yet, quite suddenly, she again shifted her mood, showing how profoundly worried and insecure she now feels about Charlotte. DM: (silence) I mean, it brings out a bit of the aggressive wasting of the father’s money, and the wasting of his potency, getting him wasted . . . This is an important aspect of the situation of the projective identification for the little girl, to intrude herself into the parental intercourse for the purpose of wasting the semen, so there are no more babies . . . JSM: Daddy’s power is all for me . . . DM: It’s the combined object . . . it’s the attack on the combination, really. JSM: Oh I see, yes! . . . Deflecting the course of the river away from the mother to cut off the combined object, more than steal the whole water . . . The next

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session she asked me for a further session weekly. However, I described for her the extreme care and ingenuity she puts in to withholding information. As I was describing it for her she could hardly stop laughing, though gently, while trying to deny it, though both quite unconvinced and unconvincing, and indeed ending by recognizing that she has to be very careful indeed in concealing a secret image of herself – “Since I have done it all my life I must have developed a keen concealing technique.” – “This seems to be part of your having concentrated all your sexual life in your rectum and indeed in deceiving everybody around you.” – “Yes . . . I really spent the greatest part of my life in the toilet . . . I’m very much worried about that now thinking that I might have got a cancer in my rectum . . . yes . . . how terribly confused I was when I realized the many holes I have.” DM: (silence) . . . the anxiety of the identification with the mother is not producing omnipotence at this point but hypochondria. The mother with this parasite in her rectum, you see . . . this cancer-baby in her rectum. JSM: When Sophie was a child she fell in love with a boy who now is the father of a friend of Charlotte. The previous weekend this friend of Charlotte gave a party. At the end of the party David and Florence fetched Charlotte. However, Sophie gossiped that Florence had intruded into the home of her former friend pretending to be intimate with all Sophie’s friends. Now, Ulricha, is another friend of Sophie who was described by Sophie as having always had a very sad life. Last night she dreamed that there was a big party at her former friend’s house, the father of Charlotte’s friend. “He now has [in fact] a love affair with Ulricha . . . the silly Ulricha” – she now surprisingly said, suddenly quite despicably. – “In my dream, Ulricha’s family appeared as rats climbing the trees in the garden where the party took place. Then, in my dream, the party turned into a shipwreck. The boy in the film Home Alone was getting drowned but Henry, my elder brother, dived trying to rescue him and eventually succeeded in bringing him out of the sea safe. Only then did we realize that the rescued boy was, in fact, Paul, Henry’s own son. Paul really looks like an angel. We then burst in joy and covered Paul with kisses.” I asked her what that film was about. It’s about an American couple who left for the week-end and simply left their ten-year-old son behind. The whole film tells how funny it was for the kid to handle everything at home alone during his parents’ absence. The film was a tremendous success in the US and the little actor became a world-famous super-star – “Charlotte loves the film. Every child does. Now Charlotte uses to say: ‘filthy animal!’” – and laughed – “What’s that about?” – “In the film the kid ordered a pizza by telephone and after having received the pizza he just sent away the man who delivered it saying: ‘Go away, filthy animal!’” As she went back, once again, to David and Florence’s supposed intrusion into Sophie’s former friend’s home, she suddenly hurled: “. . . so they MUST comply with things as they are, and that’s all!!” – meaning: “I’m the one who is intimate with the owner of the house, not they, so just “go away, filthy

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animal!”; you are but rats!” – “The silly Ulricha’s family” – I suggested – “appearing as rats in your dream, seems to refer to how you see Florence’s children if only she will ever come to have any [Florence was, at last, pregnant, after several failed attempts at having a baby. The news left Sophie mad]. Should she have any, they cannot but be rats climbing the trees [implying: in the gardens of wealthy people, Ulricha being poor and unhappy, having several “wrecked children”]. So yes, “I must comply to your demands, filthy analyst!” – “You?!” – “Yes, of course, who cancelled the session to make babies to my wife without your permission, poor rats, climbing up the trees of the garden of your rich friend whom you alone are intimate to. In your dream the little omnipotent Sophie shows up in yet another way, I think: the boy was about drowning, Henry dived and rescued him, and yet we rescued him, as you put it.” – and she seemed to me to entirely shift her “mad” state of mind to a serious and thoughtful mood. DM: . . . (silence) . . . yes, it’s a . . . (silence) . . . it’s . . . an in-the-rectum dream . . . JSM: Her sudden bursts of fury too seemed to be back in the rectum, really, the “filthy arrogance”; they are a scream of omnipotence: “go away, filthy humans! You are but rats!!” DM: (silence) . . . hum-hum . . . JSM: At this point the atmosphere in the session changed suddenly. The change was clearly brought about in the tone of voice in which she now added to my suggestion about the rats “. . . that live in the sewers” . . . DM: Hum-hum . . . JSM: “. . . yes” – I agreed – “leaving in the ‘Crazy Place’-tube-at-night; the anal world. The omnipotent Sophie felt mad about the excitement, the funny of the party, because ‘being alone at home’ seems to mean, yielding without any limits to your masturbation phantasies and your resulting triumph . . . go away, filthy analyst! I don’t want shackles! I don’t need you!” DM: . . . yes, quite . . . JSM: “Then, however, the party turned into a shipwreck.” – I still suggested – “The flickering image of your entire life turned into an unbearable disaster, just like Eva’s who the president of your office fired and told you about, as well as the unhappy Ulricha who you now described as ‘the silly Ulricha.’ The omnipotent Sophie is drowning, as you now begin to realize, but you were quickly rescued from the sharp consciousness of it by yet another hero, Paul, the angelic Paul . . . yet another ‘angel,’ above humans; the little super-star Sophie . . . ‘go away filthy humans!! . . .’”

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DM: . . . quite, quite . . . JSM: “. . . meaning, I think, the little boy who, being rescued, the entire world suddenly applauded, just like your friends applauding you for your ‘courage’ in travelling in the tube late at night in the ‘Crazy Place.’ So in your dream, you seem now confused with angelic Paul, still more deeply confused with the angelic Charlotte, and finally confused with the godish Sophie now magically rescued from drowning into depression.” DM: Yes! Of course that you’re up against the world and its values, as it were, when something can be just transformed by fame and wealth . . . The applause of her friends . . . that’s what you’re up against, really. The claustrum, the values of the claustrum are so akin to the business world, the political world, that you seem to the patient to be preaching some ascetic religion, an initiation, and so on . . . (silence) . . . We were in Paris last week and we were surprised to discover that you’re invited to visit the sewers; now they’re very proud of their sewers . . . (laughter!). And they are very interested in it because they have been built over about four centuries. But somehow, at the time when they were doing their atomic tests in the Pacific, one felt as if they were really proud of their sewers, not proud of the sewer system, but proud of the shit in it, which they call “grit.” They don’t call it shit, they call it grit. (laughter!) They have this elaborate system for filtering it out and bring it to the surface, and so on, but with this euphemism: “grit.” It was very interesting . . . it didn’t smell bad, in many ways it smelled better than up in the street really, (laughter!) with all the fumes in the traffic . . . but it seemed to be something about French culture at the moment . . . JSM: The embellishment of feces and the applause of the world . . . DM: Yes . . . you are up against it with her, really. JSM: Now the question surfaced that should she have made no progress so far I would have put an end to her analysis – “But can you really send me away? . . .” – she asked me, shocked, for although she had already considered the question before, she actually took for granted that no matter how much little Sophie may strain both mummy and daddy they would forever put up with her, nothing could ever stop them from applauding her. Her “forevers” and “of courses” seem both to speak the language of omnipotence, thus offering a version of her famous “unconditional” . . . I added that – “I am as free to put you out as you are to leave your analysis at any moment of any session if only you wish to.” However, the music of my voice must have carried out some undertone of harshness reflecting, truly, that I often do experience her quite unbearable, really. DM: . . . yes . . . well . . . it is at times necessary to remind a patient that your tolerance is not inexhaustible. But I think that one has to state it in a rather gentle

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way. Otherwise, what you mean is that if you had found her unbearable, and sent her away, she would have felt that you treated her like a piece of shit and defecated her out, that you had threw her out of your anus . . . that is what she would have felt . . . JSM: I see . . . it’s your mental language, baby-Sophie’s “view of the world” at this point, yes . . . Nevertheless, this had some effect on her, when she realized that I could . . . DM: It’s necessary, yes . . . JSM: . . . but now I realize the difference between telling a patient that I have been closely following the evolution of her analysis and, unfortunately am now persuaded that it may not be useful to continue it much longer with me for this and that reason, or act in the counter-transference my desperation about her and my feeling wounded with her arrogance and ingratitude, and so on, yes . . . And of course this slips into the music of the voice. ... JSM: The next session, I once again equated the terrifying basement with the “‘Crazy Place’-tube-at-night” and with the inside of her mother’s anus. I again suggested that this seems to be the space where she seems to experience reigning by taking absolute control of her father’s penis as the mightiest symbol of power and the unshakable witness to her triumph, and then also to control her mummy’s babies lest they might shadow her uniqueness – “My mother’s?! You have always said that it is my rectal space. . . .” As I don’t think I have ever told her this I suggested how confused her own rectal space and her mother’s still seem to be in her mind – “Yes . . . yes . . . it must be deeply confused . . .” – she added, in a depressed tone. DM: That’s very interesting that she should say: “Oh, I thought you were talking about my rectum” . . . And that’s probably because she does get her hand into her bottom to extract her feces when she is constipated. I would want to interpret that to her, which she could either confirm or refuse as she pleased, but I would feel that it’s very, very likely . . . JSM: That she actually gets her fingers up her bottom? DM: Yes, to extract the feces . . . when she is constipated and gets panicky about it . . . it’s an extraordinary panic . . . I’ve seen it many times . . . I would interpret to her, in this dream about this adolescent gang beating up Albert [left out material], that those were certainly this gang of masturbating fingers attacking some object that is felt to be in her rectum . . . Whereas in fact the meaning of it

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is mummy’s rectum, and the meaning of it is not Albert her lover, but daddy’s penis mummy’s lover. JSM: . . . part-object . . . DM: . . . at part-object level, yes. And while the attack is meant to break up something like impacted feces in her own rectum, the meaning of it is to destroy this erection of daddy’s penis and reduce it to diarrhea, because it is experienced as a fecal penis in mummy’s rectum . . . a very tyrannical penis . . . a very harmful penis . . . So, it’s quite natural that she would be confused about whose rectum it is because of the projective identification . . . You always have the two sides of the phenomenology of the projective identification, the projective side and the identificatory side . . . JSM: I cannot still understand why the hypochondria is part of the phenomenology of projection. DM: Well, in the paranoid-schizoid position, the damage that it is done to the object is not accepted as an experience, but is negated by identification saying: “No, it’s me. It’s me who has the cancer or the worm in my bottom,” and so on . . . The hypochondria seems to be part of the phenomenology of projective identification. JSM: . . . the projective part . . . DM: Yes. Projective identification . . . Well, she is certainly making steps forward . . . But I would think that she is increasingly in danger and feeling in danger . . . (long silence) . . . JSM: How can I modulate her anxiety? DM: . . . (long silence) . . . I think that the only way we have of modulating anxiety is by describing it very precisely . . . and resisting any imposture reassure, or to soften, or to minimize . . . to spell it out descriptively without any illusion of explaining it away . . . And I think the music of your voice, in doing so, is very important . . . (long silence) . . . to avoid anything that could be felt as harsh or threatening should be avoided. I think that you are likely to be in a depressive orientation to her at this point, and worried about her, and your voice will reflect that you’re worried. ... DM: I think that you better stick very close to part-objects with her. When she talks about powerful men, she’s talking about big penises . . . It becomes so indistinguishable from big feces for her . . .

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JSM: She then dreamed that she was sitting in a car between the driver and Albert. Albert told her that he was having a love affair with three women at the time: with Sophie, with his own lover, and with Eva . . . DM: What she exactly means? I wouldn’t let her speak euphemistically. JSM: She then went back to the dream in which Albert has been spanked by a gang of adolescents. DM: That’s the process of the fecal penis being turned into diarrhea, you see. It gets attacked by these adolescent in hatred of the father’s penis, chops it up and makes diarrhea of it . . . (silence) . . . yes, that’s the dilemma she is in. It’s like a person who has diarrhea and who knows that if he can resist the temptation to expel it as diarrhea, and can retain it, it will become solidified, and produce a satisfactory stool that can be expelled which won’t stink terribly, and so on, but if it’s retained long enough it will even smell quite healthy. So she will have to really restrain herself, restrain these masturbating hands from attacking this fecal penis, which means also keeping her hands out of her bottom . . . Strange enough, her anxiety is connected with the anxiety about constipation, and the panic of being constipated, and getting her hands into the rectum and extracting the feces manually . . . and this is represented here by these adolescents beating up Albert . . . It is strange that this terrific anxiety is fecal and about constipation when in the context of life in the claustrum . . . JSM: Why constipation may trigger such a terrific anxiety? DM: They have phantasies of exploding. C: The gang of adolescents is likely to destroy the penis inside in projective identification with the mother’s rectum . . . DM: That’s right. Yes. JSM: The gang of adolescent-fingers . . . Nevertheless, I feel her much closer to analysis, and certainly closer to her own mother . . . DM: Yes, but you can see how frightened she is . . . JSM: . . . oh yes . . . terribly frightened, caught in the whirl of confusion. DM: That’s very important that she is moving closer to her mother . . . JSM: . . . for the last two years or so. She now feels in paradise with her parents. And yet I have not the feeling that she is in any manic state at present or in a state

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of projective identification. She has recently been worried lest her parents would die before she was able to seriously transform her relationships with both of them. Her parents too are in heaven about her . . . they have recovered a lost child, I feel, a permanently troublesome child. This may of course change, I don’t know, but for the moment this is what I really feel is happening. The next session she told me that she has been with “. . . no nightmares, no lovers, but regressed in what concerns my bowels . . .” DM: Hum-hum, right. JSM: Why do you say: “hum-hum”? DM: Because of what we’ve been talking about . . . JSM: I have recently noticed that I have often been worried with her, perhaps feeling her new steps so fragile, worried with the extreme complexity of this process and its extreme fragility . . . DM: Well, yes . . . worrying about your patient is terribly important . . . In fact, the only way we have of keeping the patients safe, is to be worried about them. Because when we’re worried about them it’s always because they have evacuated into us their own worry, and then to accept it, and not to try to analyze it away . . . to accept it along with our helplessness . . . I mean, we are very helpless, really . . . We have to rely on words, and words are so imprecise, equivocal and slippery and tricky . . . And you think that you’ve interpret this, and the patient two months later says: “When you said so and so . . .” C: (smiling gently) . . . DM: . . . we’re very helpless . . . that’s how we help our patients, it’s by being helpless . . . (smiling thoughtfully) . . . it’s extraordinary . . .

Note 1. At two points in this chapter the sound was unfortunately lost. Each of these interruptions of the dialogue lasted for no more than a very few minutes. Both missing passages are signaled on the printed page by a sequence of three dots in bold like this: . . .

CHAPTER 13 “Well, it’s like introducing the left breast to the right breast . . .”

Summary Part-object level as a disturbed reading the world is again briefly surveyed. This includes looking at the impact of the part-object ways of thinking on warping observation, judgments, and leading to dangerous actings. A particularly interesting aspect of part-object mental organization is instanced in a dream in which Sophie seems to be introducing one of her breasts to the other. The long-lasting controversy on whether the patient should, or should not, be argued to avoid acting out is summarized. Meltzer strongly sides with the view that patients should be argued not to act out. He also argues the importance of introducing into the analytical method “something like a latency period” so as to allow integration to consolidate.

JSM: She arrived before her hour. This never happened before – “I came earlier, waited in my car, fell asleep and dreamed of Albert’s lover . . . I saw them yesterday together” – she said, this time quietly. Then she told me at length how attentive and tender her mother [whom she unbearably fought since her early adolescence and until recently] must have been for her when she was a baby. She made an inquiry at home and found out that her mother has fed her at the breast for two months and then had no more milk. Her aunt, however, continued feeding her. She then spent the remaining part of the session talking charmingly about babies and how all women in her family are so fond of babies. Then she told me about Clare: – “When I was at school, as soon as I arrived home, I taught Clare what I learned that day and she enjoyed so much learning things!” Clare was her

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parents’ faithful servant who Sophie has always loved dearly, describing her as “my memory,” because Clare is said to always tell Sophie, charmingly, many stories of Sophie’s infancy which Sophie herself could not possibly recall. DM: Her dream is mainly about the mobility of her attachments, how it has moved from mother to aunt, from aunt to cook, from cook to lover, from lover to you . . . Who’s next? And the emphasis is in how she brings joy into these barren lives and is unforgettable . . . And what she remembers is how other people remember her, and speak so tenderly about her as a baby and as a child. While seeming to idealize her objects, she is really idealizing herself, what happiness she brings to all of them. JSM: I see . . . I mistook it as a clear sign of the deep change that seems to go on in her. I also took it in the transference as . . . DM: . . . well, yes, you see, it’s such a change for her that you’re likely to be swept along by it. JSM: She was pondering going to Paris but was very much afraid lest she sinks again into nightmares and colic, hesitating whether or not she should go. This was the theme of this full week. Later this week she decided to go to Paris. When she arrived from Paris she looked very happy as she had no nightmares, no panics and no colic, in spite of her decision “to break off all limits about her diet” while there. Thursday and Friday sessions were strangely eventless. Saturday, however, she had a few dreams, the first of which she reported the following Monday – “I dreamed that my sister Helen was attending a mass. The mass was said in her honor. Strangely, however, she was sitting on the back seat of the church. Besides, she was disorderly dressed, looking both provocative and untidy. She even looked like a shocking whore.” In her dream, Sophie too was attending the mass though in a contained, serious demeanor, standing in the middle of the church, side by side with Albert’s wife, although Albert himself wasn’t there. She again mentioned Helen’s “uncontained” look, now adding, however, that she, Sophie, was herself doing “wrong things” although she couldn’t make any good sense of what was it. She also made a fleeting reference to Helen’s ugly fingers. That very morning, however, Sophie happened to meet Helen in the street. – “She looked strangely aged. She again looked ‘uncontained’ [meaning untidy], just as she looked like in my dream.” Yesterday she had another dream. She dreamed that her ear lobes were perforated, now looking extremely stretched. The lobes have swollen, got infected and full of pus. “Then, in a third dream, I was greeting Judith’s parents, meeting them in their home. As I went in, however, I realized that the make-up I was carrying with me in my purse fell down on the floor. It was terribly embarrassing.” Judith was a school friend. In her dream, Judith too looked very “uncontained.”

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Sophie had recently attempted to resume a friendly relationship with Judith but she resisted Sophie’s attempts. She knew Judith’s parents very well. “They had always been kind to me though also very distant, inaccessible.” DM: This is taking up the theme of her as an idealized baby and Helen being jealous of her. The ugly masturbating “sister,” who is watching the baby being fed, and consumed with jealousy of the baby. Now, her sister is sitting at the back of the church, and Sophie’s pierced earlobes that are gone swallowed and pussy, this is all about anal masturbation. The thing about the make-up falling is about anal incontinence. So the third dream makes it pretty clear that she has intruded inside [her own bottom] here represented as Judith’s home, as parent’s home, and that she had idealized the smearing of her feces . . . (long silence) . . . So the trip to Paris seems to have been mainly in the interest of projective identification with you and Carmo, and getting into your intercourse, and relegating the emotional disturbance to these big, ugly sister, with ugly fingers . . . JSM: I suggested that “You’re going to Paris seems to have represented your giving way unrestrainedly to masturbation [her father was particularly fond of Paris]: your decision to ‘break off all limits about diet’ seems to refer to the ‘uncontained’ Sophie, doing ‘wrong things’, sitting in the back of the church, which seems to mean: the split Sophie, entrenched in the inside of your mother’s anus, stealing ‘beyond all limits’ your father’s penis away from her inside, in the back, dark part of the church, showing up, in our dream, as the ‘uncontained’ Helen, and yet attending a mass in your own honor: in honor of the omnipotent Sophie who once again triumphed over my wife while in Paris, having stolen daddy’s golden penis from mother’s bottom.” “In your dream” – I still went on – “I believe you also gave yourself the looking of the ‘contained’ Sophie, contrasting sharply with ‘Helen-Sophie’, showing, it seems to me, that you’re really striving to relinquish Helen-Sophie’s omnipotence. However, the absence of jealousy, in your dream, seems only apparent: in fact, Albert is absent because he has been used as Helen-Sophie’s masturbatory fecal penis, represented in your ugly, thick fingers.” DM: Hum-hum . . . yes . . . JSM: “Your dream about Judith’s parents seems to show, again, your real wish to come closer to my wife and myself, as representatives of your parents as a truly loving couple, but your ‘Judith’ side – the ‘uncontained’ Judith – is still power fully hindering your desire: what you hide in your phantasies falls down on the floor, revealing your true thoughts. There is no more make-up. The kindness, and yet inaccessibility of Judith’s parents, seems to me to refer to my not yielding to the ‘uncontained’ Sophie’s attempts to show herself as a ‘contained’, serious, truthful person as you mask yourself in the middle of the church. However, the uncontained Helen, together with the dirty fingers, made the makeup

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fall down. The Judith-side of yourself no longer wishes to keep doing ‘wrong things.’ She refuses to resume any friendship with you. She doesn’t believe you anymore.” I also suggested that “The dream of your ear-lobes seems to me to refer to how you now begin to see the uncontained Sophie’s vagina as a consequence of your uncontained masturbation: deformed, infected, full of pus.” DM: Yes . . . you’ve covered that very, very nicely, really . . . (silence) . . . It seems to me that you probably bear a little responsibility for her going to Paris, in not having openly opposed it as unnecessary. JSM: Do you think that I should have opposed her decision to go? DM: Well, it was a piece of acting out, of breaking the analytic routine, of giving herself a holiday which she knew to be dangerous, doing it in an experimental way, abandoning the restrictions about her diet . . . JSM: . . . meaning, about her analysis, of course. During the week preceding her decision to leave to Paris she did ask me twenty times: “What do you think?”, and I refused to say what I thought, I just interpreted what seemed to me was her intentions as far as I was able to, including, of course, her dreams along that week, but didn’t say she shouldn’t go, first and foremost because I simply do not really know, and even if I believed I knew, I thought I shouldn’t say to her: “I think you shouldn’t go.” . . . I didn’t know. DM: There is a lot of disagreement amongst analysts about acting out. There is quite a strong current of opinion that says: but the patient needs to act out. They have to put into action in the outside world in order to be able to view it objectively. However, there are people like me who think that that’s a lot of rubbish . . . JSM: Why? DM: Because, you see, if we’re dealing with children, it’s necessary sometimes to protect the children from their foolishness quite forcibly; you grab their hand when they start to run out in the road. You don’t wait for them to be hit by the car. But that is my opinion; that it’s part of your task to be unequivocal in protecting the analytical situation against all of the excuses that are mobilized. The patient usually presents it as she has no choice but this is not to be believed that she has no choice . . . JSM: And what if I’m wrong in my judgment? You are courting fingers pointed at you . . .

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DM: Oh yes . . . You have to prepare yourself to be accused of being bossy, tyrannical, overstepping beyond your brief as therapist. Patients will often say that your brief is only as commentator. No, my feeling is that you carry a parental responsibility toward the child aspect of the patient . . . and that that child cannot really be expected, at certain times of excitement, to exercise control and restraint in a good sense. Well, let’s see what happens. JSM: Yes . . . I wonder if, in commenting on her dream of the church, I somehow missed the point of anal masturbation . . . DM: Oh no, you got it very, very well in there . . . (reads) “Inside your mother’s anus . . . stealing your father’s penis” . . . JSM: Yes, but the back of the church, usually being a gloomy, stuffy space . . . DM: Well, her standing by Albert’s wife as expressing her self-idealization as the protector of mummy and daddy’s sexual relationship. She is right there protecting, keeping this bad Helen out . . . JSM: But it would be better if I was still clearer about the anal masturbation, or ... DM: . . . well, clearer about the acting out; taking it from her inner world and putting into action in the outside world, she does expose herself to other people’s psychopathology, and the whole thing escapes from the analysis. JSM: You’ll soon see how this point seems to have come to the fore . . . it’s very interesting. The next session Sophie showed what I believed were really tender movements toward her Helen. She now seems to begin to realize how deeply her father did love her and feels disturbed at the idea that, one day, he may pass away and she may not have time to enjoy him anymore; now he begins to appear to her eyes as a really loving father. However, I don’t think I have mentioned the transferential meaning of her being worried about the idea that her father may one day die. DM: About your age? JSM: No, they are both much older than me. About the feeling that, if she still keeps doing “wrong things,” I may lose all hopes on her and give her up, showing up in her statement: “I have been wasting my father’s company and my mother’s company all my life, and I’m very worried about this, I have little time to enjoy being with them.” DM: I see, yes.

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JSM: She now dreamed that as she was just arriving at the street where she lives, a van which she doesn’t know, left, leaving her, nonetheless, with a feeling of loss and abandonment. Saturday she dreamed that she was talking, at the table of a [dirty?] cafe, with a filthy, fake, famous [real] Portuguese painter about an exhibition he has in fact shown together with an even more famous American woman photographer. This painter, in fact, seems to be particularly keen on painting scenes connected with sodomy. In the dream she felt lost and uneasy. Then she told me again how unequipped she feels to be Charlotte’s mother, that she now realizes that she has holes in her personality; that, sometimes, she rather needs Charlotte to be her mother rather than the other way round; that she can’t offer her a solid, sound model of motherhood, and how much firmer and grounded her own mother is. She then went on again describing, in touching terms, the loving sides of her family. Her love for children now appears almost in every session. I suggested that as she begins to realize the “holes in her personality,” referring, I would think, to “your budding capacity for charting the right functions of the holes in your body, perhaps beginning to bring some order to the very confused picture you seem to still have of them, still too distorted by the infantile confusion between secrecy and intimacy. You also seem to refer to your dread that Charlotte, who’s now approaching adolescence, may perhaps run the risk of sliding into ‘The Garden of Early Delights’ as well. The van leaving as you arrived at home seemed to refer to your fear of no longer being able to enjoy your parents truly and lovingly; that you perhaps fear coming out of the ‘Crazy Place’-tube-atnight a little too late, etc.” DM: . . . (silence) . . . JSM: Would you agree with this summary? DM: Oh yes! . . . She moves toward valuing her objects, she becomes frightened of losing them, and losing them before she can make her change of heart known to them . . . her change of heart known to them, you see . . . JSM: Yes . . . I think I do. Last Saturday she met Alexandra, a school friend. It was a very joyful, quite unexpected meeting. Alexandra looked so well. They met in a concert. Alexandra has a baby and was with her husband. During the concert, however, Sophie thought: “Who stayed with the baby? Could it ever be that Alexandra has left the baby alone?” She however found this a very silly idea and focused on the music rather than on this kind of thought. That night, however, she had several dreams but could only recall the last in which she felt terribly anxious because Alexandra’s baby was left alone at home. After various associations I suggested that she still fears very much that she might slide again into that painter’s world: “. . . into both the world of sodomy, and the one of that photographer’s narcissism whose only subject is her own body . . .” – “. . . yes . . . That night I didn’t go out in panic lest I might meet him! . . . [even

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though it was extremely unlikely that she could meet him]” – “. . . fearing that you might lose, all in a sudden, the baby Sophie who seems to be gradually coming to life inside you, through your analysis, who really sounds to me more human, more opposite to the omnipotent Sophie, much more capable of discovering your loving parents.” She in fact is now terribly worried about babies’ security. DM: . . . (long silence) . . . The question is: How much of the conflict is a geographical one – being inside, or being outside her object – or how much is it a zonal one – of anal rather than genital sexuality – or how much is it an economic one, of paranoid-schizoid/depressive position . . . I think that the answer is probably all of these, really . . . JSM: . . . yes, yes, all of them, it would seem . . . and it seems to be evolving rather rapidly though for now very entangled. DM: And you can’t just, you know, get out your shotgun and hit all three birds at once . . . you have to decide what seems to be in the forefront, and in need of attention at each moment. The dream suggests that it is the anality and its connection with projective identification . . . (silence) . . . At the moment she feels tenderly toward mother, and also worried about losing her . . . the moment mummy turns away, up her bottom she goes, you see . . . JSM: The dream of the church, you mean? DM: Yes. That seems to be the . . . (silence) . . . the real question; the question is: how does it manifest itself in the transference? Chances are that when she gets anxious and worried about losing you, she becomes more charming . . . (long silence) . . . I think that she probably can be very charming, and the charm is probably mainly turned on the father . . . JSM: . . . yes . . . changing the emotional color of her relations with me. DM: . . . (silence) . . . Well, let’s see what she does about it . . . JSM: Carmo suggested that, in her dream, she seemed identified with Alexandra’s baby, being very distrustful about the parents being happy together, now attending the concert together without her; without their baby; without her permission . . . DM: You see, it probably focusses on questions of trust of the parents . . . the analysis tends to narrow down to the question: “Do you have me in mind? Am I really in your mind?” . . . There is a play of Harold Pinter in which a young man says to his father: “By the way dad, that night when you and mum got me, did you have me in mind? Or was I the last thing that you had in mind?” . . .

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(silence . . .) yes, I agree with Carmo that the worry in this baby is an identification with the baby who is being forgotten at the moment of the parents’ passion for one another. JSM: “Last Saturday I suddenly decided to visit my parents [who live outside Lisbon] just to say ‘father’; ‘mother’; to call them, to utter these words . . .” As she left my consulting-room, walking along the corridor to the outside door, she suddenly stopped, turned back looking at me and said: “Today you sent me away before my hour.” Usually I end the sessions a minute or two after the hour. So now I checked my watch and confirmed that I have ended the session exactly at her hour, and told it to her right there, before she left, though of course quite gently. Later on, however, I again checked my hours, though this time against the official time, and found out that my watch was in fact a minute or two ahead of the right hour. In the last session before Easter holiday, Friday, she arrived two minutes earlier and told me that she had a terrible night because of a recurrent genital infection. “My gynecologist, who really doesn’t care the least about my problems, prescribed an inefficient medicine. I woke up disturbed and irritated with her. Then I had a terrible dream. All I can recall is that I was in a gloomy hospital in London.” – “Why do you think that your gynecologist doesn’t care the least about your problems?” – “Because I’m not an interesting case . . . I have nothing really serious, doctors are all alike, they have more to worry about, so they hasten me out. They are all beasts and omnipotent! She thinks that my genital infection is due to my intestinal problems as I defecate too often.” – “I think that you are deeply resentful of me because you think that I have hastened you out by having ended the previous session a minute or two before your . . .” – “. . . indeed! And I felt terribly abandoned . . .” – “. . . and that I hastened you off because I didn’t care the least about the first really poetic dream [omitted material] you ever brought to your analysis, which is not an interesting clinical case, so I’m an omnipotent beast . . .” – “. . . I’m sorry . . . I understand that you are sick of seeing people and eager to leave for holidays . . .” – “Besides, the interpretation I suggested about your dream was entirely inefficient, and you are right because I confusedly mentioned your father . . .” – “. . . yes . . . I didn’t understand what you said about my father . . .” – “. . . therefore, I believe I have really missed the core of your dream which seems to be a deep, sincere manifestation of love and gratitude toward me since, as a result of the work we have both been doing here together for years.” – “Wednesday, before going to sleep, I was reading a book by a well known Spanish writer entitled ‘Stories of Suicide.’ One of the tales was very beautiful: ‘Dying of Longing.’ ” DM: Well, she turns from accusing you of being sick and tired of her, as she is not an interesting case and that you hurried her out to get rid of her so you can go on your holiday. Then it turns to something more emotional, this longing . . . mummy and daddy are longing for one another. They’re not just impatient

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with these uninteresting children, they are longing for one another . . . You can see now it’s very balanced at this point of separation; and of course the child has to use its own judgment at that point . . . the nature of the parent’s feelings for one another, whether it’s excitement and lust, or whether it’s longing and passion . . . (silence) . . . Now it is true that children behave as if they could test us out by restraining the parents: “Now, read me a story mummy” . . . “I need a glass of water . . .”, so postponing . . . postponing . . . postponing. But by doing that they change the mood into one in which the parents are irritated and wanting just to get away from the child. So, it’s self-defeating, really . . . and insulting you in that way is self-defeating . . . (long silence) . . . yes, she’s hanging in the balance, really ... JSM: In the first session after holidays she told me that she had a very good, quiet time and spent a marvelous Easter week-end nearby the sea with her parents and a few of her siblings. The previous night, however, she had a terrible dream which showed – I suggested – how resentful she really was of me for the separation. My suggestion seems to have made sense to her. She then mentioned the unlimited care with which her father treated her during that week-end, and I suggested that she was secretly considering, and indeed warning me: “I’m striving to relinquish my father as the greatest god, at long last, but I’m no longer sure whether it is worth the struggle since you are going to leave me the next day . . .” DM: Right!

CHAPTER 14 “. . . I have to come here to know what I’ll do the next hour . . .”

Summary Claustrum is the name Meltzer gave to the internal world of the internal mother as it is concretely experienced by the part of the personality living inside it consequent to projection into the internal mother. However, projection is in itself believed to divide the internal mother into three very different worlds. Each of these worlds is thought to be ruled by very different values, different ways of thinking and different aims in life. Claustrophobia is another term for phenomenology of projection. It spans a surprisingly large and nuanced number of different phenomena seen in both the consulting-room and in every-day life. This chapter focus on some of the troubles facing the patient who, having lived in the claustrum for a very long time, now seriously rehearses some steps outside it. The focus in this chapter is put on the struggle inherent in renouncing omnipotence and triumph as central aspects of claustrophobia. A particular trying outcome of struggling to come out of the claustrum is the experience of disorientation. This experience results from a deep shift of values, of ways of thinking and of aims in life. This shift may often lead to a sudden relapse into part-object level as a defense against the pain of seeing the exciting experience of triumph being threatened and even partly renounced to. At times, the struggle with omnipotent feelings grows even harder, however. “But the transference is the place where her omnipotence will get dissipated, really, and one has just to focus on it all the time,” Meltzer remarked. NB: This chapter ends the fifth year of Sophie’s analysis and the fourth of supervision.

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JSM: As she left my apartment, after her Friday session, she met my wife who was coming in right at that moment. This led to a new crisis in her analysis. This new crisis lasted for another few months. Monday session she told me that she felt terribly anxious and depressed the whole night of Friday, feeling ill the next morning. Saturday she went to the beach where she happened to meet a number of old friends of her adolescence. All of a sudden she felt exceedingly well “as if I was fifteen again . . . everybody was so kind to me . . .” DM: “Fifteen again” . . . with all the conquests ahead of her, thinking about how many men she would conquer . . . JSM: “. . . everybody was so kind to me . . .”, contrasting with the analyst who had been so unkind as having a wife who she just met the day before . . . Now I don’t really need him anymore . . . DM: . . . yes, yes . . . JSM: . . . but also meaning, I suggested, everybody was seduced by the extraordinary vitality of her adolescence suddenly shining forth. DM: Quite. JSM: The next session she entered my apartment like a child who has played a serious prank on me: very shy and embarrassed, keeping on clacking her foot one against the other nervously and noisily while laying on the couch, and so on. Last Wednesday she had dinner with Edward who she first met on the beach the previous Saturday. This meeting evolved into a romance like fire set in a heap of dry straw. Edward wished to marry her at once and she was really not sure whether she wouldn’t yield to his pressure. However, Edward is presently involved with several women at the same time, haunts a milieu which bulges out with money, snobbery, idleness and full rightist views, etc. Even so, she felt dangerously ensnared by him, feeling surprisingly at home with him, even though she had never haunted this kind of milieu – “He never leaves me, you see, he’s always there . . .” – this being the only reason why her link to him flared up so immediately and so intensely. On the other hand, however, she is keenly distrustful of him as he was unable to say a single, clear word about himself and his own life, always wriggling away from all her questions about him. DM: So she immediately exploded into acting out . . . the fifteen-year-old Sophie, you see. JSM: The previous Wednesday was a holiday. She had made various attempts to ignore it and come to her session anyway. So now I told her about her deep resentment concerning the session of Wednesday – “. . . oh yes! You wished to

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get rid of me! . . .” – “. . . so that I could be free at last to join the woman you met at the outside door of this building, in my desperate wish to leave with her for the long week-end, just like you are compelled to do with Edward.” I also suggested that she were “clinging to Edward to vault over the approaching summer holidays without further deceptions.” – “ahhh . . . perhaps . . .” – she answered. DM: Right. That’s a very good interpretation. JSM: Two weeks have elapsed with her insisting on how wonderfully she feels with her relation with Edward, though at the same time how distrustful she feels of him. I have been unsuccessful to make her see what I believed is the acting-out nature of her new liaison, and how inconsistent this liaison seemed to be. And yet, I repeatedly felt that I was missing something; that something is slipping away from my fingers. DM: What you didn’t touch on – and what she avoids – is the impact that this woman she met at the outside door of the building made on her. JSM: Oh, but I did insist with her time and again about this meeting . . . DM: But you missed the qualities . . . it’s the qualities; the particular qualities of the woman . . . It’s a woman who made her feel like a girl; it was a real woman, in comparison with whom she feels a silly girl, and she behaves like a silly girl. JSM: Oh, I see! . . . DM: . . . it’s the impact of seeing this woman and quickly perceiving the qualities of womanliness. JSM: Now she began to be embarrassed with her romance with Edward though still strongly drawn toward him – “Edward rang at my door at two o’clock in the morning. I allowed him in and I just went back to sleep. And yet, his ringing entered into my dreams. I first dreamed about Edna – another friend – while she was living in the ‘Crazy Place’ who was described as a nymphomaniac. So I first dreamed that Edna eagerly wished to introduce to me a new lover of hers. In the second dream I was in my car and Isabel was waving at me, from the street, saying goodbye.” Isabel was yet another close friend who had gone through a terribly unhappy marriage for years. She finally separated and married another man though just two days after having first met him. Besides, her husband seems to have strange businesses in the Middle East. – “Now Isabel shuns every friend and doesn’t utter a word about her marriage to anyone . . . If I happen to spot her in the streets, she waves at me as if asking me not to stop as a way of saying ‘don’t ask me questions, please!” I suggested that the Edna-Sophie seemed to show the full masturbatory nature of her relation with Edward, while Isabel-Sophie suggests

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how secret her relation with Edward-analyst-daddy seems to be; how unconvincing for Sophie herself this seems to be. I again suggested to her that Edward seems to stand for daddy’s penis she again has stolen away from my wife-mother’s inside in order to sooth her jealousy related to the woman she met as she was just going out of my apartment. DM: Well, she has flown back to the part-object relationship, and that if you can find one anywhere, why should she worry about daddy’s penis? Her penises are all over the place. JSM: What would you tell her about these two dreams? DM: That she has temporarily lost her ability to discriminate between penises and men, just as she has lost her feeling of being a woman, and pushed back into being a girl of fifteen. JSM: She was terribly irritated in the session, shouting at me all the time. Could it be because I may have not been clear enough in my interpretations? DM: No, it’s her irritation with you for insisting on these differentiations . . . “I’m not a girl! I’m not a girl! I’m a woman! Look at these breasts! . . . Look at that bottom . . . that’s a woman’s bottom! . . .”, you see. JSM: An over excited adolescent out of her mind, yes . . . Well, now, referring to Edward, she says: “I have to teach him everything . . . he’s my ‘idle dog’.” She now seems dangerously enthralled with the idea of curing him, as if they both seem aware that he’s desperately ill and dependent on her. “I don’t really know whether he would ever be able to come out of this mess.” – she said. And yet, she already told a few, intimate friends of her that, at last! she seems to have found a true lover, feeling illuminated with joy. Next session she dreamed about her ex-husband – “It was a marvelous dream of reconciliation.” DM: Yes, everything is marvelous . . . you’ve got a fifteen-year-old daughter, and it’s terrible. She has got herself an oaf whom she can dominate, who obeys her, and whom she can flaunt around because he’s supposed to have a big penis . . . And that’s all that counts, inches, inches of penis . . . JSM: But then “Edward burst in tears saying that he’s mentally ill; that two months ago he had a breakdown. Having however said this, he went on once again dodging any concrete question about him. But I forgive him everything . . . He’s totally dependent on me and this gives me a great pleasure . . . I’m curing him, like he himself says . . . I’m not afraid of anything; for almost a month I have no nightmares, no colic . . . I feel in paradise . . .” – “You seem to have found a way to restore your omnipotence and sense of triumph and yet re-connect yourself

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back to analysis after having exploded in a furious jealousy for having met that woman at the outside door of the building.” – “How?” – “By making me an old, ill, invalid man, your idle dog, so now you have to teach me everything and . . .” – “. . . ahhhh! . . . it makes sense . . . Well, but it’s all unconscious . . .” – “. . . by making me totally dependent on you . . .” – “. . . but that’s all unconscious! . . .” – “. . . including making me impotent, like you thought of your own father, having looked after him, all alone, for such a long month at the hospital . . .” – “. . . and I saved him, this is what he himself repeats openly and loudly . . .” – “. . . and you felt so bewildered about his anxiety lest he might become impotent . . .” – “. . . and he became impotent, indeed.” – “You told me that he didn’t.” – “I think he did, I don’t know anymore.” – “Be as it may be, the point is that you know that I am impotent, so I will never again deceive you with my wife so now I am totally under your control. You triumphed over poor daddy-analyst anyhow.” DM: Right! Very good! When you meet this kind of pubertal omnipotence, there is nothing you can do but sort of to chip away, and to chip away, and naming that it’s omnipotence, naming the objects that it’s supposed to relegate to old age and impotence; envy, you see . . . how envious you are of her youth and her happiness . . . Good. JSM: “You told me about my omnipotence and I had an awful night. I must have been in ‘The Garden . . .’ and damaged my entire day! I don’t agree with you at all!! I’m sick of all this story of Edward! It has nothing to do with omnipotence! I wish to get rid of you as soon as possible.” – “Yes, I know, because I have been showing to you what you have been doing with me.” DM: Right, and what you haven’t been doing with me! JSM: Yes, yes . . . It didn’t occur to me . . . her secrecy, yes . . . The next session she looks absolutely desperate and lost. She called Edward again although she now fully realizes that this is a silly and mad comedy. She had lunch with yet another lover of her with whom she made plans to cope with the holidays. She shouted at me the whole session, displaying once again in full her huge, frightening arrogance. DM: So, that’s just before the holidays? JSM: Yes. Of course, we have talked about the approaching holidays over and over again. In the first session after summer holidays she arrived one minute before her hour. She spent her three-week holidays with Charlotte and her parents in a quiet, peaceful atmosphere – “I really had the feeling of restoring something, and getting rid of Edward. Suddenly, however, he called me, saying that he was nearby and would like to see me. I don’t know how he could possibly have found me, but I simply refused to meet him . . .”

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DM: . . . hum-hum . . . JSM: “. . . and to give him the slightest clue where I actually was. He however told me that he would find me and would join me anyway. That night I felt terribly anxious and had a huge colic with diarrhea.” DM: Hum-hum . . . JSM: Why do you say “hum-hum”? What is the meaning of this diarrhea? DM: Well, it’s probably a bit of psychosomatics; that has to do with the erotic excitement that is not mentalized and symbolized and dreamed about, and so on . . . It’s probably of anal nature. JSM: She’s now been back in Lisbon already for three weeks, alone, and had several dreams. “During the holidays I dreamed that I was pregnant from Edward and had a big ball in my belly. I felt terribly anxious lest the ball might fall down at any moment. In my dream, while laying down, I had to hold the ball with both hands, otherwise it would roll out of my body to one side or the other. Then, still in my dream, I thought: ‘Now I really know what Kate has suffered during her pregnancy [Kate, a niece of her, now aged twenty, was described as having developed a very incestuous relationship with her father]. Then a dark-skinned doctor came to vaccinate me against AIDS but I wasn’t really very much worried about that’.” DM: It’s a dream about an incestuous pregnancy and trying to prevent it from being born and coming out into the open. JSM: Struggling with secrecy. DM: Yes . . . It’s somehow equivalent to people who are secretly homosexual, and frightened of its coming out into the open, with the results that they don’t take any precautions against AIDS and end up with AIDS . . . The consequence of denial and secretiveness, you see . . . JSM: Although I have of course interpreted the incestuous nature of her relation with Edward, therefore fully confirmed all that has just been suggested to her before, I haven’t interpreted this dream in the transference. I suddenly realized that I may once again have been dragged away from the transference now concentrating on her father because of the obvious identification with Kate. I also didn’t understand the dark-skinned doctor, it seemed related with anality but I really didn’t see if and how . . . DM: The emphasis is on the secretiveness about the incestuous desires, and the fear that it will all come out in some way in her dreams . . . the incestuous

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relationship comes out in the color of the baby when it’s born . . . But the fear is that it will all come out, and the baby will come out with the coloring of this father . . . but behind that is the fear that there won’t be any baby . . . JSM: Yes . . . her ambiguity about the baby . . . wishing to have him though being frightened to have him. DM: Yes. JSM: Friday and Saturday she had several dreams, wrote them down, but with one exception, she couldn’t recall them in the session. Saturday, however, she dreamed of Maria, a school friend, “with whom I used to have such fun in the bus in our way home from the school when I was seven. We used to do such mad things in the bus! I dreamed that someone told me that she married a man of seventy-six [her father’s age, I think] and turned black because of AIDS. Then, in my dream, Edward appeared. I wished to go to bed with him but the place where we were was crowded. His wife showed up as well and pursued us.” DM: It’s all mixed up, you see . . . the color of the baby, the AIDS, the illicit sexuality . . . aged seven . . . JSM: Yes, yes . . . aged seven . . . The “mad things” of getting babies from father time and again, the mad things she and Maria used to do in the bus, everything confused, penis, babies, feces, the injection against AIDS by a colored doctor . . . DM: Quite . . . JSM: “It’s really strange how could I come to think of Maria! I haven’t seen her for thirty years! She once asked me whether I was a black as I was so dark-skinned after spending a month at the beach.” DM: Meaning, she wondered if my mother had an affair with a black man. JSM: Yes . . . being very uncertain . . . the dark-skinned doctor who was going to vaccinate her against her mother’s relations with this man – “When Maria was seventeen she already was a drug-addicted and had many children from several men.” – “Maria, in your dream, seems to represent little Sophie’s secret life. The difference between the real Maria and you seems to be that you haven’t yet quite allowed all these mad-things-nightmares to spill all over the place within your mental world. Your dream seems to show how you still feel compelled to resort to the omnipotent phantasy of converting your seventy-six-year-old father’s penis into your poor idle dog, reacting, through masturbation, to what you felt has been my massive rejection of you in June and July because of the changes in your schedule, now masturbating through Edward . . .” – “. . . I’m just waiting for him

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to come back from New York where he is now to tell him that I don’t want him to call me ever again and I don’t really want to see him ever again either. I would like to tell you this . . . I would not be able to do it until very recently . . .” She told me that her father used to repeat that Charlotte is his second child. She also told me that there is a very strange complicity between Sophie herself and her father about Charlotte; that “he often gazes at me in a very strange way indeed”; that he often tells me that “the sun shines for me.” Her father’s attitude toward her has been recalled in her analysis hundreds of times. DM: But what’s behind all this at the moment is the suspicion of mother having Edward, and about her not being father’s child at all . . . JSM: Oh, I see . . . the dark-skinned doctor . . . Then she told me: “I talked with Edward and sent him away. I was firmer than ever [she has tried to do this before holidays but was unable to stand up to her decision]. I really cannot understand how I could possibly have gotten involved with such a delinquent . . . In what place have I been? And yet, I couldn’t resist him for all this time. It’s strange that Albert [her sado-masochist ex-lover] and Edward they both lie all the time. Even when they say: ‘it’s raining’, and it’s, in fact, raining, they say it in a false tone of voice; they are lying nonetheless, can you understand this?” DM: Now, that’s very important. The people who tell lies, they may say the truth in ways that it seems to be a lie, and nobody believes them. And, of course, that is how they talk about their emotional life. They say: “I love you” in a way that you couldn’t possibly believe because, you know, they’re fundamentally liars . . . that’s a very important state. So, even though the facts that the person is emitting are correct, the way in which he says it is untruthful. They don’t have the feeling in it that belongs to those words. JSM: I don’t come to understand why these people are compelled to lie. In fact they are more than compelled, they cannot refrain themselves from lying . . . They don’t seem equipped to feel the truth about anything; they seem to think in a lying form about all they feel and observe. DM: Well, if you are sufficiently confused, there is no possibility of you speaking truthfully. They are confused people. JSM: I see . . . These people are really not compelled to lie; they seem unequipped to do otherwise. They cannot have the experience of being true; truth does not seem to mean anything for them. “Truth” is a sort of a word written in some entirely unknown language and in an entirely unknown alphabet. She has repeatedly mentioned, really bewildered, that Edward is continuously compelled to lie. It sounds as if it is an addiction. She now makes a real effort to understand the meaning of her former relation with Albert. – “With him I took many more

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risks by far [concerning AIDS] than with Edward . . . it was a desperate attitude on my part . . . I never loved him . . .” – “You seemed addicted to him, rather.” – “That’s the right word: addicted . . . it was a real drug. You have to resort to it every time you feel abandoned.” DM: The liar, the addict, and the delinquent are very closely connected. The delinquent also has no idea of the truth because he is so confused, that his definition of the truth is: “If I say it and you cannot disprove it, it’s true.” So he’s very dependent on other people disproving the things that he says. He cannot disprove them himself; he cannot think about them with any clarity, and so he is very dependent on other people. And of course, when you speak about yourself, nobody can disprove that, therefore anything you say about yourself is the truth. It’s only when you talk about other things outside yourself that you can be demonstrated to be lying. JSM: She spent the whole session revising the whole story of her father confiding to her his anxiety lest he could become impotent as one of the consequences of the last surgeries he had to endure, making it suddenly clear for her that her parents have an intimate life of their own. The following morning she suddenly woke up in floods of tears, seriously depressed. This morning suddenly showed her that this has been a turning point in her life. Suddenly, “everything lost its sense for me . . . even Charlotte . . .” – she said. “I was astounded . . . What was his anxiety really about? Did he have sexual relations at all by then?! I couldn’t believe it! . . . With my mother?!?!? But she’s a rag! . . .” DM: (laughs) “How could any man desire such an old woman when there are all these pretty young girls around? How could you possibly want an old woman?” . . . Well, what you don’t understand is what is a relationship; that it is not a masturbation phantasy. It’s what is called making love, as against having sex . . . JSM: Monday session, as soon as she laid on the couch, she said, in a tone of voice indicating that, in her mind, there had just been no interruption in the thread of our conversation since the previous Friday session: “. . . and that year changed my whole life . . . I became another person . . .” – and went on, again for the whole session, revising in detail, quietly, her relationships with her ex-husband, with her father, with her mother, with Charlotte, really trying to bring some unifying light and understanding to her entire life. For some time now it really seems clear that she regrets all this, as well as her squandering the time of her life, her relationships, her opportunities, and crucially, not enjoying her father as he really is, nor her mother as she really is, though they both seem to have always loved her deeply. This has all been very gradually surfacing for months now. The next session, as soon as she lays on the couch, she says, again in a tone of voice as if she was just naturally continuing the previous session, just as if there had not been the slightest interruption in the concrete stream of our conversation:

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“. . . and therefore, so and so . . .”. The whole session was then spent in my trying to answer the many questions she put me about the analytic process. I feel that something is beginning to change. This revising of her past, her trying to understand the analytic process . . . don’t you think that something is really changing by now? DM: Oh, there is no doubt . . . no doubt . . . and she is really struggling. JSM: I told her, once again, that as long as she would not be able to accept, in her mind, that Charlotte’s father is, in fact, David, her ex-husband, not her father, she may not be able to clarify her relations with him, with her father and with Charlotte. DM: Quite . . . quite . . . This is important. JSM: The “famous” Wednesday sessions are still a problem today. She now refused several invitations from Edward. “I was happy because I really could send him away but I don’t know how long I will be able to resist him if he calls me during a week-end.” For the whole remaining time of this session she continued looking back thoughtfully to her last ten years, after leaving the “Crazy Place.” – “I’m now really longing for David.” This feeling has emerged before the crisis of June, as she gradually realized how important he had always been for her; how caring and protective. For months now it has been dawning on her how terribly unjust she has been with David referring to her endless arrogance and cruelty. DM: . . . and unfaithfulness . . . JSM: The next session she dreamed that she had arrived in a country where the people were all of the same sex, she didn’t know which, and felt very anxious. DM: Meaning that she doesn’t know the difference between the sexes . . . it’s not that they’re not differentiated; it’s that she doesn’t understand this difference between the sexes. She only understands it in concrete terms, but she doesn’t understand it in emotional terms and the meaning of it. She thinks that it’s just a physical fact. It doesn’t mean anything. JSM: For the first time I really see her struggling to give away her extreme arrogance toward Florence, her ex-husband’s present wife. She however “vomited,” in the session, her huge fury against her, but then saying, as she often now does: “I really don’t like me at all in this . . . You must help me to get rid of this.” “Should my father die, Charlotte would lose all meaning for me.” – she now said.

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She fully acknowledges, almost in every session, her deep dependence on analysis and often asks me strenuously to help her out of all she really doesn’t like in her, including her dependence on Edward and now, once again, on Albert. DM: Now, the problem here is the problem of inflicting on you the responsibility. You have to do it, she can’t do it, she’s doing the best she can, she’s suffering terribly, and so on. These are all obsessional techniques for making you responsible. JSM: Yes, and I do feel responsible, yes . . . she’s again successful in this manoeuvre; then comes guilt assisting my narcissism, I think. DM: It’s necessary to make clear to her what are the limits of your responsibility, that your responsibility is to analyze her; to pay attention to her, to think about her, but not to advise her or make decisions for her, but only to show her what you think is the meaning of what is in her mind. JSM: Last Monday she had asked me whether I could change her hour of the following Thursday. As she presented what I believed was a fair reason for asking it, I changed it. “Yesterday I dreamed that I was with David and Florence and that she beat me, pulling off my finger and my right arm together. This hurt me terribly. I told her that it was not a fair fight [because she has just hurt her arm] and I think I beat her back and she stopped beating me. David was waiting for me at the landing of the stairs with a big nice dog, and was so very kind to me . . . I fought with her and won.” She then went on saying that “Albert called me this morning and was so kind to me. However, I immediately had a sudden, acute colic, went to the toilet in pain and stayed there for half-an-hour.” – “Did you have diarrhea?” – “No. I don’t have diarrhea any more. I ended by defecating normally; my intestines now work normally.” – “My yielding about the change of the hour of today . . .” – “. . . ahhhhh . . . yes . . . the importance you gave me . . .” – “. . . exactly . . . offered you the ground to win the fight against my wifeFlorence: David was waiting for you at the landing of the stairs with a big, nice dog-analyst always keen on showing you: “All your wishes must be unconditionally answered of course!” So I was so very kind to you, taking sides with you in your fight, betraying my wife Florence. Furthermore, I also made it easy for you to settle the question of last Wednesday: you won your fight against my wife, standing, in your dream, for your mother pulling your “finger-arm” off you, meaning, it seems to me: pulling from you my penis that you meanwhile have grabbed, which is so painful for you to give away. And when Albert called you, little Sophie seems to have thought: now I got him!; I had him on his knees, just as in the earliest period of your analysis when you thought you had brought your father down to his knees, at long last; he treated my jealous wishes with such importance, I have just won my father-analyst’s penis all for my own, confirming that I think that the sun shines only for you!’. So you got crazy.”

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DM: . . . (long silence) . . . Right . . . (long silence) . . . quite. . . . She’s a bit boastful about not having diarrhea . . . (long silence) . . . I think I would be more inclined to interpret to her that she is experiencing the defecation in triumph, as if to say: “Ah! but I do have his penis! I do have his penis in my bottom and you just have it in your vagina, ah! ah! . . .” Yes, let’s go on and see what happens . . . it’s very interesting. JSM: She’s now constantly worried about her omnipotence and really strives to understand it and get rid of it. DM: Yes . . . quite . . . JSM: A few weeks ago, during a week-end, she went to the north of the country to see a great-uncle who she loves and is now dying. “My uncle had the same smell as Albert . . . It’s a bad smell” – and after a long silence, she added: “. . . and the remembrance of Albert sooths me. Perhaps I had olfactive hallucinations.” DM: That’s all part-object material . . . back to sexuality, back to phantasies of sucking the penis and smelling it . . . back to the fecal-penis. JSM: I tried to show her how crucial it is for her to admit, deep in her mind, that Charlotte’s father is David, not her father, she said: “You can’t ask me that! It’s too difficult for me . . . I don’t know whether I would ever be able to admit it . . . I really never granted David the status of my husband . . . in my innermost intimacy I never accepted him as my husband.” DM: She denies what David thinks, what Charlotte thinks, or what David’s wife thinks . . . she thinks this – that’s all that matters. That is omnipotence . . . What she means is: “My husband is my father.” JSM: Very concretely, yes . . . She knows that Charlotte is her father’s daughter . . . And, for little Sophie, this really seems to be the epitome of triumph . . . It’s always surprising for me to see how often she can claim, in the same few minutes of the same session, quite sincerely, I believe, that she no longer has the phantasy of having full power over anyone, while at the same time, almost in the same statement, she can utterly claim that she never granted David the status of her husband; that Florence simply doesn’t exist; and so on. . . . These sudden, abrupt shifting from one state of mind to quite the opposite one; from a burst of omnipotence and triumph to a painful, and seemingly sincere one, saying: “No. I have already given up all my thoughts of dominating anyone whomsoever . . .” DM: Yes, you have to read it back into the transference . . . the time she met that not-your-wife woman coming in your house . . .

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JSM: . . . oh, I see . . . DM: Nothing reinforces omnipotence like money . . . oh, my god! . . . And in order to deal with it you have to stay absolutely in the transference . . . absolutely . . . It’s not a matter of Charlotte being her father’s child, it’s a matter of her not having a child from you, you see. No matter what she says, no matter what she does, she is not getting a child from you, except the child part of herself, and that’s not what she wants . . . She doesn’t want to be responsible for this child part of herself being born in her analysis. But where the cure of omnipotence will lie for her is in acknowledging that the only insemination she can get is from your ideas, and that will bring to light for her this unlovable child in herself. It is a child that it is very difficult to bear, because although it is so terribly dependent, it’s also incredibly greedy and ungrateful, that it wastes the analytic work by acting out . . . It is so reluctant to accept the pain of reality that it is willing to lie, and to cheat, and distort . . . It is a very difficult child. And you can easily understand why she doesn’t take responsibility for it, because she doesn’t have any belief in being able to control it, that it will just continue its acting out, and involving other people, and forcing them to collude in its omnipotence . . . But the transference is the place where her omnipotence will get dissipated, really, and one has just to focus on it all the time. I would be extremely reluctant to change any of her times . . . I can hardly imagine any good reason for changing a time of hers because, you see, she makes such capital of it, such evidence of you being weak, of her being powerful, of you being in love with her and her being powerfully loveable, and so on, you see . . .

CHAPTER 15 Wrestling with triumph

Summary One of the most remarkable, and I believe the most enigmatic qualities of the phenomenology of projective identification is the distortions, at times quite puzzling, of the qualities of thinking. Each of the three worlds the internal mother is very concretely experienced to be divided into consequent to projection seems to generate quite distinct distortions of the qualities of thinking. This chapter focuses on this phenomenon. The strength that omnipotence may at times reach, particularly bolstered by a deeply rooted sense of triumph, may at times try the analyst beyond his best abilities.

JSM: She dreamed that she was in an apartment with her father. There were also a number of Asian refugees. The building was all encircled by scaffoldings some pieces of it were crossing over one another thus forming a sort of a grid. – “In my dream we had to move to the other side of the street for the building was just about to collapse. I felt terribly anxious and said: ‘My things! I’m going to lose all my things!’ ” There is a common saying in Portuguese meaning that someone has gone mad which reads: “He passed over to the other side.” DM: Right, because it’s a very shaky building just held up by the scaffolding, by being supported by father’s arms, and father’s money . . . JSM: . . . and her idealization of him which now seems to begin to collapse. Hence, I thought, the feeling of becoming crazy, that her world may be about to be too shaky. This was why I suggested that this apartment, full of Asian refugees,

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seemed a reference to the inside of her mother full of babies, inside which she has reigned with her father for such a long time. When she says: “We passed to the other side . . . My things! I’m going to lose my things!” . . . DM: . . . yes, she’s coming out of projective identification, loosing her omnipotence, and beginning to realise what everything costs, not only money, but in emotional terms as well . . . that holidays cost . . . this comes all around the holidays. JSM: I thought that she was also saying: “If I ‘pass to the other side’ with my father I’m going to lose all the things I have been building up in my analysis . . .” ... DM: All the things that I have protected from my analysis . . . her omnipotence ... JSM: Oh I see! . . . the things I resisted transforming in my analysis; I’m going to lose them all, feeling lost, yes . . . But the Asians . . . full of Asians refugees . . . all the fecal insignificant penises when compared with daddy’s . . . Well, the next session was the first after the holiday. I reconfirmed my suggestion of seeing her three times weekly instead of four. She thought that this was a gift. “It’s not my purpose to make you gifts.” – I told her. “My suggestion, on which I’ve thought for months, results from my belief that you wouldn’t probably gain much, at this stage of your analysis, from having four sessions weekly, as it now seems clear that your analysis depends basically on whether you really want to relinquish omnipotence.” This was, however, received by Sophie with a burst of fury: “It took me all these years struggling really very hard for you to put it all under a name and that’s all!?!?! I struggled terribly all these years, particularly the last one, to make some progress, and you say that it depends on me, as if it was as simple as to stop smoking! . . .” – and she shouted, and shouted, and shouted the whole session. DM: Yes, it’s as simple as to stop any addiction . . . You can’t stop any addiction without withdrawal symptoms. JSM: I at first didn’t understand her sudden shouting . . . her desperate shouting ... DM: “You’re forcing me!” . . . JSM: . . . yes . . . I am putting the burden of responsibility on her shoulders and unduly shortening her time, withdrawing myself from it, leaving her struggling more for herself . . . I acknowledged her progress, as I have already done before, and told her that I know, very well, that to relinquish omnipotence and her “addiction” to triumph is certainly not an easy matter, “and I am not shortening

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your time, but it really depends basically on you, this is what I do think; I may, of course, be wrong, but this is what I do believe; I cannot do much, from now on, to help you decide.” The next session she told me another dream. “Last Monday I dreamed that I had two daughters. In my dream, the eldest, also called Helen [the name of her sister], died. Then I had a third daughter and I again gave her the name of Helen. I think that this dream is connected with a meeting I had that day.” She has met three sisters who, long ago, were close friends of some of her siblings. During this meeting, while excitedly recalling many funny episodes of their common past, the three sisters showed her a photograph of Helen and praised her very much: “She was fifteen and was really very pretty. Everybody liked her. She was really wonderful . . . now she’s quite another person.” She then told me about her sister Helen, in her dream, wording it in a tone I heard was a sincerely tender and very praising tone, telling me how much she now admires her. I suggested that the two sharply opposed sides of her now seem to emerge: her more mature side which is able to acknowledge, and praise, her mother’s many qualities, now being capable of gratitude towards her, while, on the other hand, her omnipotent jealous side killed her, just like in her dream, as the most radical way of sweeping her away from all my attention and care for her. I really feel her different: quiet, thinking in the sessions, communicating some of the thoughts she has outside the sessions. She now co-operates more actively and usefully in my attempts to closely follow her dreams. Her voice also has changed: it now sounds like the voice of a real person . . . DM: . . . hum . . . hum . . . yes . . . JSM: . . . with a third dimension in it, a quality characteristic of the people who speak from an inner space, who speak from thought, from an inner life of their own. I noticed that my tone of voice has changed too: I suddenly listened to myself talking to her, instead of fighting with her along the way. During the holidays she had no colic, no diarrhea, no uproars with her family or anyone else, and most of all, no callings to or from lovers. DM: Right. These are evidence that she is trying to give up her omnipotence . . . trying . . . JSM: “Last Friday I dreamed that I went with my father to a strange building; somehow it was in a low place. We had to go down to find the entrance door and get inside it. That place looked like a large room. John [a former occasional lover of her], his wife, and their children were there too. In my dreams, John’s children were babies (which is by no means the case now), playing with toys. Then John said something about our intimate relationship. I felt terribly embarrassed and pressed his knee as a signal for him to stop, but the knee I pressed was, in fact, my father’s . . . what a terrible confusion and anxiety.”

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DM: Yes, and in fact it was his penis, not his knee. JSM: I suggested that “The key word in your report, it seems to me, is confusion. It seems that to cope with the anxiety of the week-end, of feeling excluded from my intimacy with my wife, you seem to have decided to restore your power . . .” DM: . . . hum-hum . . . yes . . . JSM: – “How?” – “By getting back into your mother, going, with your father, all the way down a strange building to get to the entrance door, within which you suddenly found John [my name], that is, regaining daddy’s soothing penis. Now, however, daddy was not alone: he was together with your entire family, including Helen whom you recently was able to admire, my wife-Helen . . .” DM: Right! Very good. JSM: “. . . where then you seem to have been engulfed by the childish atmosphere of your phantasies . . .” DM: Yes, that’s really a very good interpretation . . . Confusion . . . right! . . . JSM: I did not, however, feel that she has slipped into her mother’s rectum again ... DM: No, not necessarily, no . . . JSM: But it did occur to me that her “my father’s knee” was, in the concreteness of her phantasy, my own penis. DM: Of course . . . JSM: But I didn’t tell her this because I did not feel it clearly enough . . . I should perhaps have told her but . . . DM: . . . yes, to bring it back to the transference. JSM: But since I was hesitating, it might not carry sufficient conviction . . . When, however, we were going back to her “we had to go down . . . ,” and I again suggested that “. . . your ‘we had to go down,’ in your dream, to get into ‘a lower place,’ into your mother, getting back to your soothing omnipotent control of your father’s penis inside mother.” She surprisingly said: “But I did have that power!” – “In your infantile phantasy, you mean.” – “But I still have it today . . . I really had it.” – “You didn’t, in reality: your father never made love to you,

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no matter how deeply he may have indulged you in that phantasy.” – “. . . yes . . . it’s still so difficult for me to realize that.” – she said, really surprised. DM: Yes, her masturbation was so vivid to her, that she cannot realise that she never had her father’s penis. JSM: But I once again did lose the opportunity of getting it to the transference. DM: Yes . . . JSM: She now seems to get closer to acknowledging the concreteness of her phantasy about daddy and of course about the real genesis of Charlotte, and therefore, the concrete role of psychic reality playing the key role in such a strong, deeply rooted belief. However, she went on, though now thoughtfully: “. . . I still think that’s me the one he loves the most.” – “Yes . . . as it is seen in your feeling so ‘abandoned’ during the week-end.” DM: Well, it is her belief that she cannot let go of, that you are deeply in love with her, and more than that, you don’t love anybody else, other patients, your wife, your children, anybody . . . She cannot let go of that belief. It is her religion ... JSM: Her omnipotence seems to show up also in the way she sometimes still drives, as if kicking away every boundary or control or “here are limits.” She suddenly realized, in the session, that she has no colic or diarrhea at all for a very long time. DM: Yes . . . yes . . . Hum-hum . . . JSM: “Now it’s quite the opposite” – she said – “I make big stools and it’s difficult to evacuate . . . I must call my doctor . . . I must have a cancer in the rectum.” – “It seems to me, rather, that you may be considering accepting, in your mind, the forbidden ‘driving signals’, trying seriously to contain your diarrheacal tendencies to invade, and destroy, your mother’s intimacy, with both power and fury whenever any restriction might be raised against your desires.” DM: Well, I probably would have interpreted to her that father’s penis has now turned bad and it had revealed itself as this shit-penis in her rectum, this being the basis of her masturbatory omnipotence; it was her anal masturbation, by which she got inside mother, and took possession of the mother, and the babies, and the father, and everything. JSM: I see . . . yes . . . After the session I felt very unpleased with my suggestions but couldn’t see why. Now I see it, yes . . . and I once again lost the thread of

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the transference. I wondered whether this changing from diarrhea to a stool “difficult to evacuate,” referred to her attempt to keep my penis inside her so as to escort her during holidays. DM: Yes, yes. But it has turned it into a shit-penis, you see; and the anxiety about cancer refers to a very bad penis. It has to do with possessiveness, to control it. Then it turns into constipation that she’s frightened of . . . People, in that situation, get absolutely terrified of constipation. They have to take cathartics, and enemas, stick their fingers up their bottom to pull out the stool, and so on . . . The confusion is so concrete that it is borderline psychotic, really. JSM: The moment she was about to leave my apartment, immediately after her session, the electric light failed. A terrible storm went suddenly out. I fetched a portable lamp to light her the way out of my apartment and gave her a large matchbox as she had no matches or lighter with her, so that she could go down the stairs [from the fifth floor]. There still was some day-light in the stairs coming from both the top of the building and its outside door. I still lighted her, from the landing of my floor, outside my apartment, her first steps down. The moment she began to go down, however, she suddenly stopped, turned back, and asked me: “Nothing serious is going to happen to me?” I answered her, in a kind, soothing tone, that nothing was going to happen to her. DM: Hum, hum . . . JSM: The next session, while she was still walking the corridor to my consultingroom, she said: “I’m sorry, I forgot your matchbox.” And then, already in the session, she went on: “I don’t want to keep for myself anything that it is not mine. Without those matches I would have not been able to go down the stairs . . .” Then she told me how terribly I had treated her: I didn’t give her a lamp or a candle; I put her out just like that; I spat her out into the storm; I said that nothing was going to happen to her in such a weary tone . . . Besides, as she was going down, she met a woman who asked her what she was doing there, raising suspicions about her. – “It was terrible . . . I felt so anxious.” That night she dreamed of Roger, the only sound, clear man I can recall she ever told me about. He is older than her and she greatly respects him. He is particularly cultivated and she very much relies on his judgements on professional matters. Every time she’s involved in a new, complex project she feels unsure about, she asks for his advice. “I dreamed that we were together with other people in a living room and he wished to fondle me. In my dream I felt deeply uneasy and anxious.” . . . DM: . . . that’s your gentle voice, fondling her as she began to go down the stairs ... JSM: . . . oh I see . . . the voice nevertheless turned into a weary tone . . .

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DM: . . . and bad and neglectful, and so on, yes . . . JSM: “Wednesday I had an awful night but can’t remember my dreams. I must have spent the night in ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’.” Roger watched some videos which were important for a project she has been working on for the University and needs sensible, expert advice. “In my dream we were both watching this video together at my home, and then we had dinner together.” – “The moment the light vanished, I should have fondled you instead of putting you out like that, throwing you out into the storm, bitterly disappointing you as it then turned painfully clear that I was going to see other patients whom you seem to have thought were new babies I had after you with my wife and then, at night, I’ll be with my wife once again, making still more babies.” – “As I went down, I threw the extinguished matches on the stairs, soiling them . . .” – “. . . yes, I very well know that you so often soil my words and my thoughts in rage making them all into diarrhea because I do not yield to your forceful attempts to make me kneel down and fully acknowledge that you are the only person in the world I am boundlessly dedicated to.” – “. . . but then I went back and picked them all up. I was never afraid of going down stairs in the dark. I see exceedingly well . . . it’s strange why did I feel anxious. You threw me into the street.” So I went back to her disappointment and to her hardly repressed wish to stay with me in the dark, watching her videos, making sure that I would really not see anyone else, thus soothing her fright of once again seeing mother being pregnant again after having her. She then accused me of having lured her into all these feelings and of having manipulated her unconscious into having analysis; that I should have inform her from the outset that psychoanalysis is very dangerous. DM: She insists that you are omnipotent, and you could have foreseen all of this, and she can’t help but suspect that you made the lights go out . . . You are a magician at this point, and therefore responsible for everything . . . JSM: Oh . . . but she did tell me that . . . She did say: “It’s your apartment, so you should have everything needed to prevent this from happening.” . . . DM: Yes, you should have an auxiliary generator that you can just switch on, and the lights will go on to pick the matches up, yes . . . the obsessionality comes out . . . really like the Rat Man with the stone and the road . . . he puts the stone and then he takes it away, and he puts it back again . . . JSM: Oh, I thought that it was a sign of depressive position, of reparation for soiling mother’s breast in rage . . . DM: Yes, of course, but it’s obsessional . . . JSM: . . . and yet repenting, I thought . . .

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DM: . . . because it takes such an omnipotence, as if she shat all over your stairs and had to go clean it up . . . In fact, she would have to eat it, really, to make reparation in this omnipotent way. JSM: The following session she told me: “Last Tuesday . . .” (now I felt that the depth of her wickedness is really revolting). “Last Tuesday I visited my father. He was hurt with me because I’m not seeing him for a long time now; because I’m not interested in him anymore, and so on. But I told him: ‘I’m interested in you in the exact measure in which you are interested in me! Why don’t you see me at my home?! Why don’t you call me at home?!’ He was quite astonished, and indeed very hurt with me. Now my mother crawls towards me since neither me nor Charlotte have been visiting them as often as we used to . . .” – “So you just threw at your father your diarrhoeic rage about my having disappointed you so bitterly by not going down the stairs with you and then fondling you, like Roger in your dream, by soothingly saying to you that nothing serious was going to happen, and you did hurt him very much. You were shouting at me, in fury, that I should visit you as much as you visit me, and then watch your videos, and have dinner with you, and I should show you my exclusive interest in you and not paying attention to the patients whom I see after you . . .” – “. . . you cannot see any patient after me . . .” – “. . . nor before, I guess.” – “No, before you can, but not after.” – “Why?” – “Because it’s too late.” – “For how long have I seen you later?” – “But then you told me to come sooner . . . Later is already too late . . . you must be tired . . .” DM: What a hypocrite . . . You’re not allowed to see other patients after her because she requires you to be so preoccupied with her that it would be impossible for you to pay attention to these other patients . . . because you would be full of her, absolutely full of her. JSM: And also confirming her feeling absolutely frightened lest her mother had babies after having had her. DM: Oh yes . . . JSM: After having made babies to her I am exhausted or ravished or both or god knows what, so that I cannot make babies to anyone else, particularly not to my wife. DM: Yes . . . quite. JSM: She began the next session saying: “I again forgot your matchbox. I picked it up at home to bring it to you but then forgot it.” However, she immediately turned everything I suggested to her on its head, again exhibiting her lust to submit other people, and I of course told her all this. – “Saturday I had lunch with

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my father to ask his advice whether I should request a fifty percent raise of my fees at my office. He immediately said that I should, of course. But since he applauds everything I say, I never know. This morning I talked to the president of my office and told him that I wish you to increase my pay otherwise I would quit. He told me that the planned increase of fees was 6 percent. I told him that then I would quit, turned my back on him, and sent him an email confirming it. If they don’t give me what I want, I’ll quit. What do you think? I’m very badly played. Now I feel much stronger and better and less dependent on them all, so I may quit.” – “I think that you are still enraged with me because I didn’t do what you wanted me to do last Monday when the light went off.” – and I went on again through the lamp and the matchbox, and so on, adding: “. . . and you seem just about to turn all the improvements you have made in your analysis into a weapon put at the service of your omnipotence, thus soiling my stairs again.” DM: Very good . . . JSM: “Saturday I was really about to get crazy. I dreamed that I have joined a boyfriend I had when I was twelve but David was there too. I just blasted out in such a shouting at him, and then, in my dream, I just started biting him, physically. I was so mad with fury that I thought I was going to get crazy. I was really afraid . . . That night I went to the toilet time and again though not with diarrhea, as I have none anymore, but to urinate. My problem now with feces is that it comes out unformed. I also dreamed about you, wrote the dream, but can’t now recall it.” DM: Like the matchbox . . . JSM: Yes, yes . . . like the matchbox . . . DM: She can’t do anything that might please you . . . anything . . . She is in such a rage with you, that you didn’t walk down the stairs with her with your lamp, and make the storm stop, and so on. JSM: “Your dream seems to offer a clear picture of how mad with fury you are with me because I didn’t submit to you last Monday, and again on Wednesday, and yet again during the week-end . . .” DM: . . . quite . . . JSM: As I mentioned once again her lust to get people crawling like a poor obedient humiliated dog behind her and kneeling at her feet – this being a frequent reference she has actually made several times in the past, in these same words, about how she ravished treating David, but also men in general, kneeling down before her, and crawling behind her like poor dogs. So now I reminded her

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of all this but she denied having ever said that. So I just recalled her words: “Now my mother crawls behind me because neither me nor Charlotte . . .” DM: . . . yes . . . JSM: “Yes . . .” – she answered, with such chilling indifference – “and she crawled again this week-end . . . I told her that Charlotte and I were going to have lunch with them on Sunday. She was very embarrassed for she had already arranged to join Helen and her husband to have lunch with them. ‘Oh’ – my mother said, very anxious – ‘Never mind . . . I will cancel the lunch with them.’ But I said to her: ‘No, no . . . Oh no . . . If you are going to have lunch with them, we don’t go.’ – ‘But I’ll cancel the lunch’ – my mother insisted. ‘No, never mind . . .’ – ‘So why don’t you come along with me and have lunch with us?’ – ‘Oh no . . . never mind . . .’ ” – and so on and so forth, in a hardly bearable revengeful, sadistic and hurtful tone of voice. – “Which is pure sadism” – I told her – “now spurted out at your mother, just because I did not crawl behind you at your feet as you wished me so very much to do, and did not go down the stairs with you, confirming the truth of your phantasy that I do adore you above all other beings. You are so mad about my not yielding to you and watching me going down the stairs, ahead of you, just like a poor silly dog, to light your way even if you didn’t need a lamp to go down, as you yourself confirmed, that you now just blast your fury against your mother, your father, your ex-husband, but on the other hand, you go on threatening to leave your analysis.” – “How?” – “In your burst of arrogance exploding absolutely groundlessly on the face of the president of your office: ‘If you don’t raise my fees by fifty percent I just decided I want you to – just an impossible and quite provocative demand – I will just quit.’ [But I don’t think I have succeeded in couching my suggestions in a language free from a cutting and irritated tone of voice]. If you don’t make me a baby now, I’ll just quit!’ ” – “I will never quit my analysis . . . never; don’t be afraid” – “Don’t – be – a-fraid . . . No, Sophie, you are wrong . . . I am not afraid. As I told you once and will repeat it now: you may leave your analysis at any moment of any session and you can be absolutely sure that I will not move a finger to stop you from leaving . . . at any moment whatsoever. No, Sophie, I am not afraid of seeing you leaving your analysis; I am worried that you may go on and on inflicting such a serious, useless and utterly unfair pain on other people around you, and damaging your life so seriously as you have been doing for almost all your life. ‘I feel much stronger now, I have improved, I am more independent’ – you boasted, which seems to me to mean, in your childish omnipotent and very primitive mind: now I have good breasts, and a vagina, and I know how to fuck, and to seduce every man, and so if you don’t yield to my wishes, I just blast out your door and leave, just like an arrogant adolescent” – “Arrogant?” – she asked. – “Yes: sheerly, madly, unbearably, stupidly arrogant, just like any completely crazy and silly adolescent, yes. That’s exactly what I do mean.” She quietened down, and agreed. – “But don’t you agree with my attitude concerning my

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office?” – “No, I don’t.” “Your attitude has nothing to do with your office, has nothing to do with either the director or the president of your office, and has nothing to do with your fees. It’s all a lie. ‘I’m very badly paid!’; ‘I’m very badly treated.’ Yes, though not in your office. You are badly treated here because I didn’t crawl down the stairs on my knees for you to stamp on me because I refuse to make you a baby. It was all yet another outburst of arrogance and rage against me on Monday.” DM: Well, she has got you on what’s called a “sticky wicket” . . . I mean, to let her go down the stairs in the dark, and possibly fall and hurt herself . . . I think really that the first rule in analysis is kindness, and I think that it was not kind to just give her a matchbox, and you probably should have gone down the stairs with her lighting her way . . . JSM: Would you? DM: I would have . . . Because she might really have hurt herself. I mean, to fall down the stairs is not a good thing to do . . . So, I think that she is gonna make the most of this . . . we’ll see. It’s not a mortal sin, it’s just a little unkind thing, really. You feel that, with this girl, you can’t give her an inch without her taking a mile . . . But there’s something to be said for gentleness, and gentlemanliness, and kindness, particularly with a woman patient and a man analyst. JSM: Then she went on: – “David refusing to pay for Charlotte’s dentist is outrageous, don’t you think?” – “No, I don’t; what is outrageous is your spurting out your fury into everyone around you . . .” DM: . . . yes . . . JSM: . . . “just because of my refusing to comply to your whimmy, omnipotent wishes, because of my outrageous refusal to yield to you.” – “But does it really have to refer to . . .” DM: “. . . you all the time?” But it does refer to me. JSM: “No, it has not to, but as far I can see, in all these cases, it essentially does refer to me, not to my person, of course, I don’t exist, I am a sort of a clothhanger on which you hang on your feelings and your phantasies concerning your parents and your siblings, and so on, a representative of your parental figures.” – “I can’t see it.” – “ ‘Now my mother is crawling behind me on her knees because neither me nor Charlotte . . .’, you see? Why should you suddenly enjoy so much making your mother crawl behind you, can you understand? What prevents you from seeing it is your sheer abhorrence of dependence, of your believing that dependence is just the filthiest thing in the whole world.”

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DM: (laughing gently in agreement) JSM: – “It is!! It certainly is!!” – she shouted out. DM: . . . right . . . Very good! JSM: The next session she arrived fifteen minutes late. She had a terrible uproar with both her director and the president of her office. This uproar took hours. “I never had such a [fierce] discussion with anyone. I have put the president to the wall. I had plenty of reason. So I felt stronger and stronger. Then, however, I felt so nervous that I thought of calling you. Later I called my father, my brother, etc. . . . They all gave me their opinions. Meanwhile I learnt from Charlotte that Florence is pregnant.” [Florence had real difficulties with her first pregnancy. Now she has overcome them.] “This came like a bomb for me. Everything is now going to change. Now Charlotte is going to have a sibling. I wished to call David to insult him for his refusal to pay for Charlotte’s dentist but I refrained from doing it. I should rather call him to greet him. He must be very happy. What do you think about the problem at my office?” – “I think that you had an outburst of omnipotent triumph and arrogance aiming only at me, as you stole my matchboxpenis believing that I too would crawl on my knees behind you.” – “I didn’t steal anything from you.” – “. . . and you keep it under your total control, bursting in triumph – I’m stronger and stronger! – and yet going mad with fury because I do not comply with your demands.” – “Did I ever fear going down any stairs in the dark?” – “I’m sure you didn’t, except this time.” – “Why?” – “‘Without the matchbox I couldn’t have gone down the stairs’, you just told me. So you still expected me to confirm that ‘the sun shines purposefully for you’ [a statement she believed her father uttered about her and which has made its road in her analysis] by going down the stairs with a lamp. Since I didn’t, you snatched my penis and still keep it under your full control. Without it, I think, you would feel weak and unprotected. But since you still keep it with you, you feel that you have total control over it. ‘Now I have put him to the wall down on his knees!!’, you shouted out to me about having caught your father in some problem, in the beginning of your analysis. This is what you have just been doing with the president of your office.” I told her again that in her outburst of rage against the director and the president of her office she was warning me that I should submit to her and stop throwing her out at the end of each session . . . – “Oh yes! You just throw me out at the end of each session . . .” – “. . . and to renounce seeing other patients after you to be with my wife . . .” – “. . . you don’t see other patients after me . . . no you don’t . . . it’s too late . . . you must be exhausted.” – “Why?” – “You already told me that I exhaust you.” DM: Well, she is what one would call an exhausting patient, whether you are actually exhausted or not, she is an exhausting patient. She exhausts your patience

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more than anything else, but she is not an intolerable patient and you’re not a wreck when you finish seeing her. JSM: Oh, certainly not. DM: You’ve lost your temper with her . . . and she holds it against you, you can’t help that. She knows that you love her. And she thinks that if you love her, you must want to give her your penis, what else could love means, she doesn’t know anything else, except “love equals give the penis” . . . and “love means I want the penis” . . . that’s all she knows about love. But your counter-transference is vivid enough in your tone of voice . . . JSM: I mean, it’s revolting to listen to a number of things that she tells me . . . and her unbearably arrogant tone of voice . . . the way she enjoys making her mother crawl behind her is quite unbearable, really. DM: It’s a hard job, yes . . . what Bion calls “making the best of a bad job” . . . JSM: Don’t you yourself often feel very revolted with the way that some patients ... DM: . . . yes, indeeeed . . . (long silence) . . . But I try to keep quiet until I have control of myself again. JSM: I see . . . Monday session she said: “I had many dreams, wrote them all down, but now can’t recall them. As I was coming here I was astonished how could I have possibly forgotten my dreams!” DM: The matchbox . . . JSM: Yes! Again! She then told me how exhausted she is of listening to me alluding to her omnipotence. I heard in her protest the true voice of weariness. She’s lost and depressed. She called Albert but he didn’t call her back. “David [whom she again insulted in quite revolting terms] has now rebuilt his life. This leaves me more and more alone. Being alone I am unable to re-organize my life. I’m ill and caught by my illness.” DM: Right. JSM: The next session she left a message saying that she was not coming. The following session she said: “I’m extremely tired of coming here, of recalling my dreams, of listening to you . . . I feel violently constrained! . . . I don’t agree with you . . . it’s not only what you say; there are more things . . . I’m in the most serious crisis of my analysis . . . I read the dreams I had last Friday which I wrote

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down but now forgot them . . . I can only recall that, in one of them, there were some women who have been sodomized and were bleeding from their anus . . . it was in a party. In another dream, Albert has cut his hair and now has a fringe. There’s still another which I don’t remember . . . I had such a resistance in reading them . . . coming here like that isn’t efficient, what do you think?” JSM: I didn’t understand her reference to this dream of Albert, “cutting his hair, and now has a fringe” . . . DM: Well, she has depenalized himself, castrated himself, by not answering her phone call. She gave him an opportunity to sodomize her from her bleeding anus, but this coward is such an effeminate creature now that he refused. And, as for you, “you’re no better than my president, and I’m gonna quit, if you don’t stop interpreting my omnipotence.” JSM: She then went on: “Yesterday my mother had dinner with us. I enjoyed so much cooking for her and being with her quietly.” DM: There’s the other side of it, you see . . . She has become more aware of what an infantile and omnipotent creature she is, and how aggressive, she also becomes more adult and better able to enjoy the adult side of her relationships, limited as they are. JSM: She really sounded sincere in her saying this . . . The next session, however, she suddenly told me: “I don’t know whether I’ll continue my analysis. I don’t agree with you at all that everything can be traced back to my omnipotence . . . it doesn’t account for everything . . . I’m very tired of my dreams. Last Friday I had another nightmare. I dreamed that I answered the telephone to receive the result of an AIDS test and it was positive. My father also listened to the call on another telephone. In my dream, I was astonished with the result and said to him: ‘Father, it’s positive . . .’ It’s awful. That night I went to bed with John. My dream must be linked with this.” So she herself begin to link this kind of masturbatory activity with the rise of persecutory phantasies. DM: Quite. JSM: “I’m really very tired. Charlotte told me that David is going to buy a new house as they are now going to have a baby, and I’m afraid that he may buy their house in my street . . . it would be intolerable . . . I feel squeezed by listening to you saying time and again that everything is my omnipotence . . . not everything is omnipotence.” – “You seem to refer to the crisis which was triggered by that Monday when the light failed . . .” – “. . . aaaaahhh!! . . . of course . . . ! . . .” – “. . . and by your wrenching from me my matchbox-penis. This is, again, all about your omnipotence . . .” – “. . . it doesn’t exist anymore.” – she said, suddenly

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laughing, though this time in a quiet tone. – “I’ll bring you 1,000 matchboxes!” – “No, you won’t. The question is my matchbox-penis, the one you stole from me and refuse to renounce to, in your mind, to take revenge on me since I terribly disappointed you because, instead of going to bed with you, at long last!, and fondle you, the five-year-old Sophie, and definitely stop having new babies after you . . . ,” and so on. DM: Yes . . . “It’s your attempt to make a reparation, but also to deceive me . . . What I would like to know is what happened to my matchbox” . . . JSM: I know what happened to my matchbox . . . you will see in a moment. DM: What was it? JSM: She said: “I don’t believe in psychoanalysis . . . You did put me out . . . and I had to meet a sinister woman on the stairs who was suspicious about me . . .” – “. . . accusing you of the stealing you have actually done. In your mind, she therefore was quite right in accusing you.” At this point, however, the atmosphere of the session suddenly changed into a quiet, thoughtful, cooperative one. The next session the first thing she did as soon as she entered my consulting-room was to put on my table a matchbox identical to the one I lent her, saying, smoothly: “Here is your matchbox.” I decided, once again, not to interpret her dream of last Friday in terms, I think, of the sheer violence of her having burned the matches, one by one, both my penis and my new babies, for I conjectured that the dream of the women bleeding from their anus was a consequence of her burning my matchbox . . . DM: Maybe so, yes . . . JSM: But I didn’t feel it clearly enough to suggest it to her. DM: I think that it’s more likely that it’s a function of her getting her fingers up her bottom to extract her feces. JSM: In concrete terms? DM: In concrete terms. Women find that very hard to admit. JSM: But do you think that it really happens with adults? DM: Oh, yeees! yeees . . . ! They get very frightened of being constipated and when they take cathartics and it doesn’t work, they take enemas and again it doesn’t work . . . Yeees! I had one patient who screamed: “I don’t do that! . . . anymore . . .” (laughs gently)

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JSM: She was again very quiet and said twice: “I told Charlotte that I will put her out [if she keeps on misbehaving] but she doesn’t bother the least since she knows that I’ll never do it.” It didn’t occur to me, in the session, that she was telling me . . . DM: . . . that’s about your warning her that you will kick her out but she doesn’t pay any attention . . . JSM: . . . but also, I thought, about her warning me that she’s going to leave analysis. Then she said: “I’ve just come from the burial of the mother of some friends. I was terribly impressed as I watched all the three sisters going into the funeral car to accompany their mother’s body to the cemetery . . . Suddenly, I thought that my mother is much more important for me than my father . . .” I first kept silent as I felt, in the music of her voice, that she would immediately throw out everything I might have said to her. Then she asked me what I thought about her feeling so impressed with what she saw. – “It seems to me to suggest your intense fear of being shut inside your dead mother . . .” – “. . . aaaah!! I don’t believe it at all! Inside my mother?! What does it mean??! That’s a cliché!”. I tried to tell her why I thought that her dream seemed to me to speak of this fear in the clearest way I could find, but again she threw it all up in the air. DM: Now, the point I would make about her: “suddenly I thought that my mother is much more important than my father” . . . I would say: “That is still holding on to your omnipotence. It just means shifting to your mother’s breasts, and you mean ‘I am more important to my mother than my father is, just as I am more important to my father than my mother is . . . I am the center of the universe’.” JSM: But her fear about seeing the three sisters going into the funeral car sounded very claustrophobic . . . DM: Probably, yes . . . But I would have asked what she means by “impressed” because it doesn’t say anything. It only says that there was some phantasy, or some emotions stirred in her, but I don’t know what it was . . . I would like to know what this impression amounted to. JSM: . . . yes. I did misrepresent her meaning, or at any rate my feelings about what she said. Although her actual word was, in Portuguese, literally impressed, the music of her voice, as she described this picture to me, was loaded with a rich shade of emotions. What I heard in the music of her voice, whether it was right or wrong, was that she felt frightened, upset, somehow distressed, and probably also both shocked and wondering as if, under the impact of this unexpected picture, she had suddenly been compelled to review uncountably many episodes and feelings and thoughts cramming her relationship with her mother, as if assessing

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it altogether back in an instant. And I did feel her frightened of having no way out of it . . . being caught inside the funeral car-grave. DM: Yes, it might . . . I don’t think that your interpretation is wrong but I think that her contemptuous rejection of it is perhaps an indication that you didn’t elicit enough evidence to be able to show her the evidence of it. Otherwise what you can tell her, she feels, is just a cliché . . . “All you analysts say things like that . . . When you don’t know what else to say, you say such things . . . ,” you see. What Bion called column two of the grid, things that you say to hide the fact that you don’t know what to say. JSM: I thought that she violently rebuffed what I said because I failed to interpret in the transference. She asked me again to tell her what claustrophobia really means and I told her about many people feeling scared of being entrapped in caves, or within narrow passages, etc., and this seemed enough for her to suddenly understand what I meant when I told her that she seemed frightened of being buried inside her mother’s body, adding: “You also were impressed because you yourself might have died . . .” – “. . . aaaah!! yes . . .” – “. . . and therefore you would no longer be able to make reparation for all the endless rages and damages you have done, during your entire life, to your mother, before she died.” – “Ah, to that extent only, ok . . . that’s true . . . my relationship with my mother has improved . . . that’s the only positive side of ‘this’ [referring to analysis] . . .” – “. . . and also because I might have died . . .” – “. . . aaah!! . . . yes . . . that’s also true . . .” – “. . . after all you have said and thought for the last three weeks, and you could have suddenly lost the motherly side of my relation with you . . .” – “. . . motherly?” – “Yes . . . which has been crucial for you in assisting you to restore your internal relations with your mother.” She calmed down at once, and the rest of the session, I believe, was both quiet and fruitful. DM: Yes, that’s very good . . . that’s really very, very good . . . JSM: What exactly installs this omnipotent state of mind – is it the act of projection, of intrusion, of breaking the gates of intimacy and identity inside the object? DM: Yes . . . It is installed through the intrusive processes. The breaking in, yes. C: But why should people want to force their way in? What’s in the genesis of that movement? What leads a child to force the gates? Is it the separation anxiety? DM: The world is the mother’s body. And the garden of Eden is inside the mother, and it is part of infantile psychology to return to this garden of Eden, to this paradise. And whatever the motives are, the direction is the same, there is always this direction to get back inside the mother. It may be from envy, it may

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be from competition, it may be from terror of the outside world . . . the motives are legion, but the direction is the same. And of course, the portal of entry [the eyes, the vagina, or the anus] makes a big difference in the qualities that you discover and what compartment that you get into. If you do it through the eyes is different than if you do it through the anus.1

Note 1. Donald Meltzer takes kindness as the first and in a way most important quality he would expect an analyst to possess. Kindness is a complex concept, however. Meltzer elaborates on its meaning in (Meltzer 1997, p. 182). Kindness implies a capacity for a sustained passionate interest for the analysand’s mental life, a capacity for goodness and tolerance, and a well rooted sense of respect. Kindness must however not be confused with seduction as a cover for cowardice, ignorance and a number of different forms of weakness. For the importance of kindness see also Steiner 2016, p. 434.

CHAPTER 16 “ . . . the way in which she does it is by crawling inside everybody and controlling them from inside”

Summary This chapter is a discussion of the tortured ways of egocentricity. The struggle to come out of serious states of projective identification may at times put the analysand at odds with the experience of not knowing who one exactly is. This may, however, raise technical problems, some of which are shown and discussed below. The concept of reparation is brought to question. In Meltzer’s view, this is “. . . a misleading concept . . . You try to undo the damage you have done, where the only kind of undoing you can do is to take back your projective identifications so that they’re not left inside the father, or inside the analyst, controlling their lives.” The concept of reparation would therefore often seem to speak of omnipotence. The differentiation between excitement and true emotion is also stressed.

JSM: “Last Saturday I dreamed that Florence had already been delivered of her baby. Her pregnancy, in my dream, was therefore much more developed than it is in reality. Then I dreamed of an island . . . it was so beautiful . . . the sea was blue . . . there were two islands one upon the other [one over the other?], full of vegetation.” I couldn’t get any understanding of her second dream and she immediately fled away into feeling frightened that her family might begin receiving Florence and her baby. Suddenly, she changed her tone of voice. She then turned her focus heavily on Florence, and then also on David, feeling desperate that she might lose her deep sense of uniqueness within her family. They may perhaps begin bringing their baby to her parents’ home. Charlotte’s uniqueness may as well be lost. This was what I told her and she couldn’t hold a laugh which carried her unwilling agreement. – “I’m not jealous of David. I don’t want to have a baby from him.”

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– “You don’t, yes. You want to have a baby from me to revenge on all those I have been having with my wife during holidays and week-ends – all those I have been so busy in seeing here after having seen you each time, rushing you to the door. You rather still need David to keep on crashing him under your huge contempt, vomiting on him your unbearable disappointment about him following your recent discovery that Charlotte’s father is David, not your golden, god-like daddy, which however you still cannot bear. So you still need him for this purpose, instead of taking full responsibility for the way you have used him and what you have done to him all along these years.” She tried, very misleadingly, to shift both facts and responsibilities on to both David and Florence, debasing David for some reasons, Florence for others. I also told her that she still does not understand the service she has put both David and Florence to as the privileged containers for her enraged frustration. “In fact” – she surprisingly said – “I imagine that I’m a daily subject matter of conversation between them.” I asked her on what grounds does she think this. “I don’t know . . . I just imagine.” – “So if you don’t succeed in being the core of their attention for good reasons, you will be the core of their attention for bad ones, imposing yourself both at the centre of their relationship and between them, intruding into their intimacy.” DM: And that’s why you have to take up the transference. She imagines that she is the centre of interest for you and Carmo, and that all you talk about is Sophie, Sophie, Sophie . . . JSM: Yes, yes . . . – “I imagine David smouldering in rage against me. My father has always made me think that I was the center . . .” – “It’s your idea, and may be you are right, but what’s crucial is what you seem to have always made of that.” – “But I’m not doing this to David out of wickedness.” – “Out of pure, sheer, deep wickedness.” – I said, shocked with her. DM: (laughs gently) . . . Hum-hum . . . So, again you missed the opportunity to take this all up in the transference . . . JSM: Oh yes!! Again, yes . . . I evidently acted in the counter-transference! And I still cannot see the transferential meaning of her two dreams. I thought that it was so unbearable for her to watch Florence giving birth to a baby, and feeding her, which she cannot do herself, that, out of envy . . . DM: . . . why can’t she do it, is she sterile? JSM: No, I mean, she still seems incapable of getting out of this incestuous relationship with her father and allow herself to . . . DM: . . . oh I see; it’s her egocentricity, yes. She can tolerate for you and Carmo to have a relationship so long as she is the baby, that is the subject of all your

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interest, that’s what holds you together. Otherwise, without the baby, you would have no interest in one another, it’s only the baby that pulls you together, yes. JSM: But also, I think, because of her refusal to renounce the phantasy of still possessing her father’s golden penis really inside her, not being able to find the mental space for having a baby who would not be her daddy’s. It still seems unthinkable for her. DM: Yes . . . Quite. JSM: These beautiful islands, one on top of the other, which seem to allude to mother’s breasts . . . DM: . . . yes the two breasts, really. I don’t know what she means by “one on top of the other” . . . JSM: I was also unsure. But what I got from her was the idea of having two isles over one another just like any two common objects which you can pile up one over the other. The representation I construed was of the couple confused with the breasts generating her, that is, provided she herself is the new baby . . . DM: It could be but it’s probably mainly the two breasts that are being offered to this baby. JSM: Yes, Florence’s . . . Now I’m a little upset for I realise that I have been losing the thread of transference yet again. Something is happening . . . DM: Yes, yes. She leads you away from it. JSM: . . . and that I seem to indulge in her pressure not to . . . DM: . . . well, you know, she seduces you away from the transference. JSM: Very likely so, yes . . . I feel astonished . . . I haven’t noticed it while in the sessions . . . Only later. – “I went to a children’s birthday party and was shocked . . . the children were all cornered into a narrow courtyard, the high, bare walls of the building next to it stifling this already tiny space . . . I felt the children completely alone, moving senselessly, uncoordinated, no one being there to direct them to a definite purpose . . . I felt so shocked . . . the adults do not give a damn . . . they really do not care at all about their own children . . .” DM: Well, I think that the point about the material is that Florence has given birth, and now she goes to a birthday party as if she was right inside Florence, and it is a terrible place for children – how lucky they are to escape from it – she is

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the one who help them to escape from this terrible place inside Florence. She is the only one who loves children. It’s all self-aggrandisement seen through in terms of projective identification, getting inside Florence and delivering her this baby which she doesn’t care about, a sad child, and so on . . . JSM: But of course all this is about Carmo and I: poor babies whom I have been seeing after her and . . . DM: . . . of course, of course. JSM: The previous Monday she had told me that she couldn’t come on Friday as she had to go with Charlotte to see her doctor. I asked her whether she had to comply to that precise hour. – “I asked the nurse whether I could come a little later so that I could come to my session, but she asked me not to do it. The doctor is very strict with his hours.” She also told me that she could never bear waiting in the consulting-rooms and that “my dentist trembles when he’s going to see me” [because she is also very strict with hours]. Reluctantly though, I offered her an alternative hour. DM: Yes . . . It’s very difficult . . . I mean, what does she expect a nurse to say? Of course that the nurse will say: “Oh, of course my doctor is more important than anybody else” . . . So, she doesn’t say that she can’t come at that time because she has a previous commitment; she asks permission to force you to give her an alternative time. This is all her omnipotence, and the way that she manipulates things in order to justify her omnipotence. JSM: However, she left a message saying that after all she would come to her session at her hour. – “If you don’t call me” – her message says – “I assume that I still have my hour.” I didn’t call her as I had, in fact, her hour free. However, since I also had no one the two hours before her I went out quickly to the supermarket which would normally take less than half-an hour. Therefore I went there long before her hour so as to be sure I would be back well in time for her session. As I was leaving the supermarket to return home I was caught, inside the building of the supermarket, for almost an hour and a half because of a huge traffic jam of dimensions I had never seen before. This traffic jam blocked all the ways in and out of it, and indeed just paralysed the entire web of streets immediately surrounding the supermarket. I had no telephone with me and no way of calling her, the underground park being crammed with cars tightly queuing up, unmoving, but of course no one could guess when the traffic jam would resolve, hoping that it would be over in minutes. I arrived twenty minutes late to her session and she was no longer there. I called her in the evening asking whether she had come, apologising for my delay, and telling her what happened. She actually had come, waited outside the building for fifteen minutes, and then took two and half hours to arrive back at home because of the same huge traffic

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problem. The following session she said: “You are going to pay high and loud for what you’ve done to me.” DM: She said this rather as a joke . . . JSM: . . . oh, no! . . . She absolutely did mean what she said. DM: Is she quite serious? I mean, you have to tremble like her dentist trembles ... JSM: Exactly, yes! You can see how sometimes I really wish to just throw her out through the window so as to see her faster out of my sight . . . It is not always easy to stomach her arrogance and her omnipotence and her egocentricity. Then she told me, in a really worried and depressed tone, how mentally ill she really is, as she felt completely lost, and physically ill, feeling terribly cold, thinking that she had got fever . . . – “I’m very surprised as I didn’t get even a flu for the whole winter [implying that she now feels much better physically, which is undoubtedly true]. I felt unable to go out for the entire week-end . . . I’m really unable to carry on a normal life . . . I don’t know what to do . . .” – she said, displaying at length her despondency. – “You really don’t care the least about me . . . no one does . . . now Mike [an occasional lover she tried to reach during the week-end to sooth her, I presume] doesn’t call me as well . . . Now I realize that no one likes me . . . my father does, perhaps, but he’s clearly so far away . . . You shouldn’t have gone out . . . you should have stayed, waiting for me . . . you should have foreseen that the traffic jam might have happened.” DM: So, quite clearly, “you should just sit in your chair and wait for me all the time.” JSM: Yes, of course. Anything you like but to make me wait . . . I give you my permission to choose a problem among all the many possibilities reality may offer you except making me wait . . . – “That night I dreamed that I was spending the week-end with a [woman] friend of mine [and her parents?] in a large, quiet house in the country . . . it was such a peaceful atmosphere [conveying, in her voice, a real feeling of quietness]. Then you showed up with a woman. I felt very embarrassed and thought [now in a voice sounding very much like an ashamed child]: ‘I’m not guilty; I’m not guilty’.” DM: Yes, there’s projective identification for you . . . It links with the previous dream of the beautiful sea and the blue sky and the two islands . . . And here she is inside, and you surprise her inside, catch her inside again, as usual; she is always getting in, in one way or another. How was she inside you? “Well, we were both caught in the same traffic jam, weren’t we? So there I was, inside with you, and it was so quiet and peaceful . . . but you didn’t appreciate it. You were thinking

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of that other woman . . .” – after she had made a great sacrifice of cancelling the session with the doctor. JSM: I see, yes . . . She then told me that she had cancelled Charlotte’s doctor so as not to lose her session, but the time of the session was over. DM: The dramas are sado-masochistic dramas. Sometimes she is the sadist, sometimes she is the masochist, but always they are sado-masochistic dramas – always there, everything is on the edge of chaos. And that is how she lives, on the edge of chaos. JSM: She then said: “I offer a false image of myself to everybody.” – thus quite confirming what you have often said. – “It would be better to assume that I’m profoundly ill and stop pretending . . . The truth is that my whole life is a rag . . . I also offer you a false image of myself. I’m terribly scared that you might lose your patience with me and put me out . . . this may happen, mightn’t it?” – “Yes, it may . . .” – “Yes . . . we have no written accord . . . I’m afraid that you may think awful things about me and lose your interest in me. There is no way out, what do you think?” – “I think that I understand what you say but don’t agree that there is no way out. I really believe that there is a way out, and that’s the way I think you have been following: the slow, but serious renouncement of your omnipotence and your sense of triumph. Triumphant about your mother making her crawl behind you; feeling as an unbearable wound that I have inflicted upon you by making you wait for twenty minutes; and so on. But every time you take a step forward in that direction you feel that you are deeply deprived of every good and of every quality, whereas what really seems to me to happen is that you may at last begin allowing your real qualities to come into light, and perhaps begin to use them fruitfully for yourself and for others.” DM: What you’re saying is really: “the renouncement of your omnipotence” . . . That kind of interpretation doesn’t really help when it comes to a situation where a person is experiencing claustrophobic anxieties. The interpretation has to be more concrete than that. You have to say: “The situation you’re in is the result of your being in a false position in life, that is, your having got inside your mother, or inside me, to try to control us . . . and that is what creates your sense of omnipotence. The question of how to get out of this place you have got into is a very simple matter – you go out the way you came in, if you can remember how you came in. And if you can understand the ways in which you get in, then you can easily find your way out. For instance, how have you got in, at this moment, while we have the experience of David and his wife have had a baby, and you are eaten up with jealousy and envy, and we see from the experience of the birthday party at the school that you have got inside her, and are seeing it all as a terrible place and of deprived children, and yourself as the rescuer of these deprived children . . . ,” and at the next moment it is Charlotte who’s the deprived

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child. So you have to review it for her. For that is the material that she has demonstrated of why she got in, how she got in, what are the consequences of it . . . And the implication is that you get out in the same way that you got in, by deciding that David and his wife have had their baby, and that their relation to one another is better than you have ever had with anyone and it’s natural that you feel envious of them and would like to get inside Charlotte and spoil it for them. And you do the same with me. You tell me that I should have stayed in my chair waiting for you, I shouldn’t have gone out, running the risk of keeping you waiting because I was caught in the traffic . . . I should obey you! That is your demand, that everybody should obey you, because you just get inside them and control them from inside. Then you said: “Oh well, but it’s quite nice being inside so long as it’s my house! And I’m in there with Charlotte, that’s quite nice; inside my fortress . . . it’s other people who try to get into my fortress, but I really keep them out . . .” To show very concretely the manipulation of the geography of her life and of other people’s lives . . . But to tell someone to renounce her omnipotence really doesn’t get anywhere . . . It’s like saying: “Well, be good!” It’s no help. It is a useless piece of advice, really . . . “If I knew how to be good I would be. I just don’t know how to be good! . . . you don’t tell me . . . I’m telling you: get out of Florence’s belly . . . stop controlling everything in that household, and being sanctimonious and thinking that it’s such a terrible place, and so on . . .” JSM: How often have I spelled all this out very clearly to her? Now, the day she was just about losing the tape for a congress and then the train [omitted material] – she now told me – “I felt that I was another person; for a moment I stopped feeling myself . . . everything would then be lost.” DM: Well, she had a sudden realization that she is in and out of projective identification. When she is in projective identification, she thinks that she’s a different person. When she comes out of projective identification, she feels depressed because she finds that she is the same person who treats everything as an excuse for getting inside somebody else and changing her identity. JSM: “Last Friday I dreamed that I was with a man. We were going to a room but in that room there already was Peter [another occasional lover of her] in bed with another man . . . how strange . . . Peter had a baby with him . . . he slept with a man and had a baby with him . . . there was also a tube for squirting toothpaste . . . In another room there was yet another man, also in bed with a man, and this other man too had a baby . . .” DM: Now, the point about this dream is still her hostility about David and Florence. JSM: Oh, I see! My making her wait for me, attending my new baby who does not make life so hard to bear as Florence and David who already have a new baby.

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DM: She is inside them, and her ill will toward them is going to make the plane crash . . . “Oh no, it’s not a plane, it’s a car . . . Oh, there are dead bodies in the car . . . Well, anyhow, it wasn’t Florence and David, it was Peter and another man who had the baby . . . That’s what happens, these homosexual men are always having babies. Men don’t love women, they just love other men and have babies with them . . .” And it’s repeated, they go to another room, and there’s another man with a baby . . . I mean, she just changes the script as she gets anxious, gets desperate as she gets closer to the truth . . . And the truth is simply that David and Florence have had a new baby. You and Carmo might have a new baby at any moment . . . JSM: We certainly have one otherwise I wouldn’t have made her wait 20 minutes for me, yes . . . DM: Yes. And when you have a new baby, you certainly won’t put up with this nonsense from her, you will get tired of her if you have a new baby. So, the only thing that she can do is to impose herself upon you . . . as you say, “crawl at her feet,” to submit to her, to be her slave . . . It’s the only possibility, I have no choice but to enslave you! How else can I keep you from dropping me? Because I’m such a horrible person, so difficult to get on with, everybody dislikes me . . . The only thing I can do is to be very strong and very forceful, and make them all be my slaves. And the way in which she does it is by crawling inside them and controlling them from inside . . . and, of course, it all becomes a nightmare. JSM: I thought that the tooth-paste referred to a confusion between the breast and the penis . . . DM: Well, it is, but it’s all denying that David and Florence have made a baby; it’s mockery; they put their penises in one another’s mouths and that makes a baby. JSM: She was worried as her father, now nearing 80 and still working very hard. He felt suddenly unwell. DM: Hum-hum . . . JSM: Why do you say “hum-hum”? DM: Well, I’m thinking that she is in a period when she is overwhelmed with her feelings about David and Florence having a baby. There is hardly anything you need do at this point except say: “You can’t bear it that David and Florence had a baby.” These are all attempts to distort the situation, you see. And then, of course, you may indicate to her that when she came on Friday, and you weren’t there, she immediately thought that she was being dropped by you because Carmo was pregnant.

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JSM: Yes, yes . . . Nevertheless, I felt that she was really worried about her father being unwell. DM: Well, that’s all in the transference . . . either Carmo was having a baby or you having a heart attack, one or the other. It’s all egocentricity. JSM: The next session she was very disturbed about her father although he’s better now. She showed, once again, her life-long, absolute fascination for stories about her family. She again mentioned her deep love for her grand-father who died many years ago. He used to give her “aaaaall the time in the world! . . . , stretching time to the infinite as if in Eden . . .” – her voice resounding like an idyllic dream every time she refers to her grand-father for the endless tender attention he had always given her. DM: To which the only answer is that it will take you a long time, I can see, for you to forgive me for keeping you waiting for twenty minutes. C: . . . and besides he is no longer going to have babies. DM: Right, he’s no longer going to have babies, right. JSM: Now I may perhaps now have recovered something of the lost thread of the transference . . . I may have just been put out of her mind, she being entirely absorbed by Florence’s and David’s baby, “nothing can be of any interest to me . . .” DM: Of course . . . JSM: Do you see in my repeatedly losing the thread of the transference some sign of cowardice? DM: Oh no! I don’t think so . . . no, no! I think that it has to do with sexuality, really . . . JSM: Sexuality?! . . . DM: She is a pretty woman, I think . . . JSM: Yes, and exceedingly vital; infectiously vital and infectiously capable of joy, yes. But something goes on . . . I feel somehow afraid of her, I have been unable to see the precise nature of this fear – if it really is fear . . . DM: . . . of course! We’re all afraid of pretty women . . . yes, believe me . . . we’re all afraid of pretty women . . . (smiles gently)

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JSM: “My father died” – she now said, in pain, but quietly, as soon as she entered my consulting-room. – “He died during the night of Saturday and was buried this morning.” Then she told me about the terrible shock she had the very moment she suddenly looked at him, on returning from abroad where she has been for two days. – “As soon as I saw him, I suddenly realized that he was no long there . . . that I had lost my interlocutor.” She again had diarrhea – which she was no longer having for the last year or two. She almost stopped eating. So all she can evacuate is liquid. She also resumed smoking. – “I saw him impotent.” – she said. Some of her descriptions seemed to me to echo both her fright and shock before his impotence, referring to the moments he was just about to die, while many others remarks of hers sounded to me as deeply loving and tender. She was shocked because of the way her siblings started discussing money and one of her brothers went to play tennis . . . DM: That’s really a part-object description: “I saw him as a limp penis.” And she’s shocked because of the way her siblings started discussing problems of money . . . she’s shocked because one of her brothers went to play tennis . . . she is shocked about other people, but she has diarrhea, has resumed smoking, is anorexic, and so on . . . But she is not shocked about herself, she is always shocked about other people. JSM: But this was a shocking description, this family meeting . . . DM: That’s the way she makes it sound. JSM: Oh I see . . . DM: She makes it sound as if this was terrible. She would say: “How can you even think about money when dad is dead? You don’t love him, I’m the only one who loves him,” etc. . . . JSM: . . . that’s exactly how it sounded to me, yes . . . DM: “Just sit in your chair and say nothing! Slaves . . .” JSM: The next day she left a message saying that she was really unwell and a few friends were going to join her, so she wouldn’t come to her session. She also couldn’t come on Friday because of the mass for her father. The following session she was exhausted because she just had another family meeting which shocked her still further than the preceding one and she couldn’t sleep the whole night. “There has been a dinner which ended in a party. One of my siblings – who never liked my father – was just euphoric, and I was mad with fury and indignation with him but couldn’t be angry with them now, could I?” And that’s why she had diarrhea, I think . . .

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DM: Maybe . . . JSM: What else could it be? DM: I think that it’s more likely that she’s shitting out her impotent father . . . We’ll see, you have to wait for dreams to tell you. JSM: “I feel moribund. Yesterday, when I woke up, I noticed that my hair has suddenly turned white. I rushed to the hairdresser to paint it back in its original colour. A few small wounds also appeared in my hands [she showed them to me] . . . Perhaps I got AIDS. Friday night I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes.” However, her diarrhea stopped and she’s sleeping reasonably well again. The next session she seemed really sad. “I feel ill . . . I had great difficulty in getting up in the morning . . . I slept for a long time but don’t know what I was doing with my eyes closed.” The tiny wounds in her hands seem much better now. She didn’t mention having diarrhea anymore. “I don’t want to be with anyone but with my mother. I have been with her every day . . .” DM: And she wants to be with her mother all the time but her mother probably doesn’t want to be with her all the time; she may not realise but her mother had lost her husband . . . JSM: “It’s still difficult for me to believe it, to realize that it happened . . . he was my best interlocutor . . . it’s difficult for me to realize that I can’t speak with him anymore . . . When I’m alone at home I very often utter the word ‘father’ . . . ‘father’ . . . ‘father’ . . . ‘oh father’ . . . I talk to him. Jealousy, competition, fight . . . oh no . . . all that now entirely lost its sense for me . . . jealous of what? I can’t even grasp what could be the object of jealousy . . . My mother is reacting much better than I. She’s already putting his clothes in order . . . She told me to have a look at them since I used to wear so many of his pieces of clothes for so many years . . . he used to give them to me, all sorts of clothes, even stockings, but now I really can’t . . . I wasn’t even able to look at his clothes . . .” She has now been suffering from an abnormally prolonged amenorrhoea. DM: Yes, I would think that her organs are expressing her ambivalence to her father. Her rectum has defecated him out as an impotent old man, because he wanted to have sex with her mother – that old rag – but her vagina is weeping for him. That’s where her depression is, her grief, her mourning, in her genitals. And to have diarrhea and amenorrhoea is expressing her ambivalence toward him. But you need a dream to confirm it, otherwise it’s all stories, and she wants people to tell her stories, she doesn’t care whether they’re true or not, she just likes to hear stories.

CHAPTER 17 Mother’s inside transformed into a golden grave for the triumphant child

Summary This chapter focuses on the experience of mourning and its psychical meaning. It discusses how egocentricity, on the one hand, and projective identification, on the other hand, may hinder, and eventually prevent mourning. The difference between being confused and feeling confused is looked into and the shift from the former to the latter is seen as a key progress. States of confusion implying feelings of omnipotence, omniscience, and triumph may prevent Sophie from both feeling confused. The gratifications of sadomasochism seem to have similar effects on the capacity for both feeling confused and mourning.

JSM: Charlotte told her that “when the baby [of Florence and David] will be born I’ll move to father’s home.” She was shocked with Charlotte and asked her whether she really meant it – “ ‘Of course! It will then be much funnier! Now everything changed . . .’ – she said. – So I lost my father, and now I’ll lose my daughter . . . Everything has changed for me now; even my relation with Charlotte . . . she’s no longer as important as she has always been.” She kept a quiet but sad tone all through the session, sounding like a child trying to bring her play-room back to order again after some sweeping turmoil, though occasionally spotting her descriptions with a sad: “. . . but nothing is the same again . . .” DM: Hum-hum . . .

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JSM: Why do you say hum-hum . . . ? What is worrying you? DM: I think she is depressed . . . She is not mourning her father; she is depressed. Everything is falling to pieces . . . JSM: Yes . . . The next session she told me that, during yet another family dinner, someone said that Helen, her sister, who has been living abroad for years in the same town where her father had been born and lived until he met her mother, was her father’s favorite. – “I had a shock. That night I felt so strange . . . so unreal . . . I can’t explain how did I feel . . . I’ve always thought that I was his favorite but I was obviously wrong . . . it was a life-long illusion . . . very probably my father said all the same endless seductive things he used to say to me to each one of us . . . it’s my fault if I was convinced of the contrary . . .” – “Your feeling strange seems to suggest that you felt your identity has been shaken . . .” – “. . . exactly . . . Most of my identity . . .” – “. . . and that your identity has largely been, and still perhaps remains, crucially hanging on the image you have always imagined your father had always conveyed to you, of loving you ‘unconditionally’” – “Yes . . .” – she said, worried – “. . . I’m still very dependent on my father’s image of myself . . .” DM: And that is the image of being his penis, and that his penis was, in her mind, really his favorite thing in the world . . . JSM: Twice in this session I felt that when she told me about her terrible need to “sleeeeeep” she was actually telling me about her terrible need to die. DM: Hum-hum . . . That’s probably true, yes . . . JSM: “Charlotte feels so much the need to be with me physically. She needs me to be there, concretely there . . . Now she sometimes wants to sleep in my bed. Last night I dreamed that I was coming to my session but was stopped by a bad man . . . what a terrible confusion . . . I was in a well known place in Lisbon. There were a lot of people there . . . I can’t describe this terrible feeling . . . police cars everywhere . . .” [this is in fact an old, beautiful, but always very crowded area in Lisbon, where her father had one of his offices. While she was an adolescent she was the only one allowed to be in this office, doing her homework, describing this experience in a tone of pride and triumph, being treated like little princess]. She clearly didn’t want to listen to anything about her dream, and moved on steadily to how last Wednesday and Thursday were both painful days for her. “But the worst was Thursday . . . Next day I called Jeremy [another ex-lover of her] just to listen to his voice . . . his voice soothes me . . .” – “. . . to cope with the anxiety of the holiday . . .” – “. . . aaaaah, yes . . . the holiday was terribly difficult. Then Jeremy left a message suggesting a meeting but I didn’t even call him back; I just fled to my mother’s home.” She then said she was hesitating whether she

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should sleep in her mother’s house being afraid of it. I unsuccessfully tried to look at her dream but she would shift away from it. Nevertheless, I still asked her: “What was it that you did not wish to think?” – “Of staying there for the night! . . . it’s so violent to sleep there without my father . . . his presence is still so vivid everywhere in the house . . .” – “It seems to me that your dream may describe your serious swaying between coming to your analysis and staying for ever inside your parents’ home . . .” – “. . . aaaah . . . yes . . . I have already thought of it, you know . . .” – “. . . fused with your mother . . .” – “. . . being a widow as well, isn’t it? . . . Well, I thought it already! . . .” – “. . . rather getting yourself unconsciously inside her . . .” – “. . . not unconsciously! I have thought of it very clearly . . .” – “. . . inside her . . .” – “. . . that’s quite right . . . it’s really that . . .” – she repeated, really astonished and relieved – “. . . so that you may keep your father for ever inside you, well alive, as you said about his presence in your parents’ house, not only inside your parents’ home but inside you, in the form of all the remembrances which haunt the house, to cope with the holiday, this being perhaps why you haven’t call Jeremy back . . .” – and again she very much agreed, thoughtfully. – “That’s why you talked of claustrophobia of coming outside; and the bad man, the police cars, the terrible confusion, all seem indications of your resisting coming here, coming outside, outside your mother, and really mourning your father’s death.” – “Now all my siblings left for the south, to the beaches, living me alone with my mother.” DM: Yes . . . well you get this shift from being father’s penis and looking after her mother in this privileged position, and feeling that she has pushed out all of her siblings, and taken possession . . . they were pushed in to the south, where they will be happy in the beaches, but she finds it very violent being alone inside her mother, countering up these happy memories of father’s office. So she is oscillating, and it’s only in between these oscillations that she catches a glimpse of the mourning of her father really being dead, which immediately is accompanied by feeling abandoned by you and threatened by the bad man, and so on . . . Jeremy’s voice doesn’t comfort her in the way your voice does, and when he suggests a meeting she doesn’t even bother phoning him back. JSM: “That’s a bad side of my mourning, isn’t it?” – she asked. “I think it is . . . I think it is a side of your not mourning your father.” DM: That’s right . . . right! Good. JSM: She has already been repeating for some time now that “people really don’t interest me”; that they do not really understand what she has been experiencing; that now they are all essentially worthless for her. DM: She is cross with you for saying: “you’re not mourning your father . . .”

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JSM: “Last Friday I dreamed that I went with Charlotte to Albert’s house [her sado-masochist ex-lover]. Strangely, however, in my dream, his house was quite like my own when I was between twelve and twenty-one, in the same street, the same building and in the same floor. What a strange visit . . . it was very late in the night. In my dream everything in his house looked so familiar . . . there was a gas water-heater in the living-room. It dripped water on the sofa. The sofa looked just like my own. What was still more disquieting was that we went there so late, and as we moved in, everything was really so well-known to me, so familiar . . . it was dark inside . . . I have been sad the whole week-end . . . sad – sad – sad . . . I was all alone. Charlotte was with her father and I didn’t go out . . . I refused every invitation to go out.” She again mentioned mourning her father but I suggested that her mourning still seemed very ambiguous. – “Why?” – “Because it is one thing to mourn your father, another, very different, is to ‘mourn’ the image you think he had of you.” DM: That’s very good. JSM: “. . . aaaaah, yes . . . So I have two mournings to accomplish.” – “I don’t think so . . . I think that there is one mourning only to be made, and this is for your father himself, as he himself really was, not for the one you seem to have idealized, and not for the image you may still enjoy thinking he had always had of you. These two images – of your father himself, as he really was, and the one you have always imagined he had of you, the one you seem to cling to still today. This seems the one you would need to renounce to if you have any hope to really mourn your father. This seems very confused in your mind with the so-called mourning of your narcissism, of the glorifying image he seemed to have had of you.” – “But how? I don’t agree with you . . . He was the only person in the world who was unconditional about me . . .” – “. . . that’s exactly what I was trying to tell you . . .” – “. . . more than unconditional . . . still much more than that! . . .” – she added. – “. . . meaning that for him there were no limits, as far as you were concerned, and therefore, no barriers, no fences for you yourself for as long as you have him inside you, all for yourself, and this is what you seem to be at odds with to ‘mourn’; this confusion between this god-like father and your real father. You seem to be struggling with the threat of loosing this enthralling phantasy, not yet, I believe, to realize that you lost your father himself. This is precisely the status of a goddess you always wished to believe he has enshrined you in, and that you have always welcomed so much, for all your life, and knew so well how to best feed all these feelings in your father. What I was trying to say is that you can hardly mourn your father for as long as your longing for him will remain centered in him as the guardian of the goddess he has probably always made of you and to which you still seem to cling so earnestly to.” DM: Now, all of that is correct and really very good. But it doesn’t quite take into account her suspicion that he did this with everybody, that he was the

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arch-seducer who made everybody feel that they were his favorite. That’s why there’s so much squabbling about his new will; that everybody expect to be the heir. JSM: “But I did love him . . .” – she went on. – “He was so important for me . . .” – “Yes. I know . . . But just look at how your references about him really seem to always flow back into yourself: ‘he was unconditional about me’; ‘he was so important for me’ . . .” – “. . . but I really loved him so dearly . . .” – “You may have loved him dearly but what I’m trying to show to you is that your feelings about him are still very confused with the image you believe he has always had of you, and it’s really not clear whom did you love so much in him, the person who was so unconditional about you and used to tell you that the sun shines for you, or the real person of your father as he was . . . It may perhaps still be difficult for you to know whom he really was.” DM: Now, this is the point at which I think it’s necessary to interpret to her that you do believe that she loved him as well as she was able to love anybody. But what you’re struggling with is the limitations in her capacity for love due to her egocentricity. It isn’t that she needs to love; she needs to be loved unconditionally . . . So it is her narcissism and her egocentricity that is impeding her mourning for him. That she is losing him as her high-priest . . . as you say, as a goddess mourning the loss of her high-priest . . . “Oh, but she has a new high-priest . . . But he is not so dependable as my father was . . .” JSM: I feel, however, that, mixed up with all her narcissism and egocentricity, she really loved her father very much. DM: Oh, I’m sure, but the quality of her love is not very good. The quality of her love is very narcissistic . . . This is what you’re saying. JSM: Not exactly, I mean . . . I believe that there is something in her that really loves her father, though it is still very much muddled up . . . DM: . . . why do you want to believe that when you have such evidence of her narcissism and of her egocentricity? That only means that you want to believe that, in spite of the transference, she really loves you. It’s transference and it’s narcissism . . . Potential . . . it’s potential, but it hasn’t been achieved yet. I mean, the love of children goes from being narcissistic, to being possessive and jealous, and only eventually becomes altruistically loving, really concerned with the welfare and happiness of the object. But that’s a late stage of development, that’s the entrée into maturity . . . Even at the threshold of the depressive position you have this possessive love; and, of course, it’s terribly ambivalent because your prisoners don’t behave themselves . . . JSM: But do you think that nothing is true in her claim: “I did love my father”?

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DM: No! . . . JSM: It’s difficult for me to accept that . . . DM: Even you and your love for your father, it was limited by your immaturity ... JSM: Most certainly, yes . . . DM: Most certainly? . . . JSM: Of course, most certainly! I am still somehow immature today and I will always remain immature, thank god! It’s a question of degree, not of “Now I am mature!” It’s an unending process – fortunately! DM: And then your love was immature . . . JSM: But of course it is immature! . . . Or rather, also immature. But of course! But why are you surprised? DM: But immature means either narcissistic or at least possessive and jealous, and so on . . . JSM: . . . and so on and so forth, of course! Competitive, and ambivalent, of course! It may occasionally still have a point of competitiveness, and here and there another of ambivalence, I hope! I don’t believe in pure diamonds, fortunately! DM: So? . . . JSM: I hope I will never be an angel . . . No, please, no angels! DM: “It’s gold!” . . . “No, it’s only gold plated” . . . JSM: No, it isn’t gold-plated, I really hope; it’s mostly gold, yes, I hope, though occasionally also plated, yes, of course. My version is sometimes it is real gold; some times it may be closer to gold, other times just gold-plated, yes . . . I hope I will never live enough time to be perfect . . . I hate perfection . . . So I went on: – “Let me remind you of the session, a few weeks ago, in which you told me that what interests you the most is to listen to stories about your father while he was young . . . that he was much more beautiful then . . .” – “. . . yes, it’s true . . .” – “. . . and that he became so different after having surgery . . .” – “. . . yes . . . he was not a beautiful man but he changed very much after having surgery . . .” – “. . . after the world has crashed down in pieces when you imagined, though wrongly, that he has gone impotent” . . .

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DM: . . . hum-hum . . . JSM: “. . . ah yes . . .” – “. . . and the reappearance in full of all your former phantasies about him in your dream of your visiting Albert together with Charlotte, the whole atmosphere being so promiscuous . . .” – “. . . oh yes, very promiscuous . . . how unpleasant . . .” – “. . . and his place sounded just so familiar to you; you and Charlotte got into it, just like that, in such a closed, dark space, so late at night, inside a terrible confusion . . .” – “But is it abnormal not to feel any joy in anything and about anyone?” – “To be unable to restore your links to life seem to suggest that you still hesitate between living inside your mother’s house, where your father is still so alive even today, as you said . . .” – “. . . yes, so alive . . .” – “. . . thus, once again, desperately clinging to what you wished to believe had always been his imagine of you – to his image of you – thus renouncing to the world outside where everyone and everything is now suddenly devoid of any interest, . . .” – “. . . yes . . . nothing really interests me . . .” – “. . . and so full of so worthless people . . .” – “. . . yes, people don’t interest me . . .” – “. . . if compared with his being so unconditional about you . . .” – “. . . yes, but what’s wrong about that?” DM: Quite! What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that loving? . . . JSM: “I fear that you are under the strong drive to go back inside your mother again in order to keep your father all for yourself and for ever.” – “I don’t understand you.” – “Your dream seems to show that you are back again into ‘The Garden of Early Delights . . .’ ” – “. . . ahhhhh yes . . . and always Albert . . . I’m sick of him . . .” – “. . . it’s not Albert himself, I think . . . it’s your father’s obedient penis, as I have so often suggested to you, that you have grabbed and used as the main argument for your triumph over your mother as well as for your triumph over everyone else, women and men alike, so goddess-like, and yet so promiscuously, as your privileged instrument of masturbation, for all your life . . . the ‘promiscuous Albert’ . . . the ‘promiscuous penis’. There is a big difference between keeping inside you the true image of your real good father, in your heart, in your mind, whatever the image he may have had of you, and desperately cling to what you think he still keeps of you today . . . this is clinging to an image of you yourself, certainly nor for him as he really was . . . you felt so lost just because your some one said that it was Helen who was his favorite . . .” – “. . . oh yes! I felt awful . . . it’s true . . . I’m still very much dependent on the image he had about me, yes . . . you are right . . . It’s strange . . . sometimes I think that his death has been even more painful for me than for my mother . . .” – “The second widow . . . indeed the real widow, the true widow . . . So you actually seem to get yourself fused up with your mother again, forestalling her about your father’s so powerful penis, so in love with you still today, so alive in your mind, so much confused with Albert-in-your-mind, which indeed is a thought so much unkind to him but you don’t seem to understand it. And your lack of interest in everybody

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and everything outside this house so full of him seems to result from this.” – “In fact my mother is recovering much better than I . . .” – she said, now upset. – “My mother asks me desperately to visit her, not to leave . . . I can’t stand it . . . I wonder if I should go to live with her . . . but I can’t force Charlotte . . .” – she said, twisting her voice and her words in what sounded to me a true pain. – “You seem to feel sucked into this golden grave which encloses all your goddess dreams you imagine that your father, though dead, still keeps quite alive with him in your phantasy . . . and I wouldn’t be surprised if you sometimes feel you would better die as well and join him, inside that grave, fused up with him for ever, not to be separated from that crucial part of yourself.” At this point she remained silent for a short while, and then said, in a low, thoughtful tone: – “. . . I have already thought of it . . .” DM: . . . hum-hum, right. That’s a very good session; you’ve worked very, very well with her in that session. That’s really very good . . . It’s more touching to see her suffering instead of the usual manic, promiscuous, omnipotent self. JSM: In coming to her next session she stopped the lift on the sixth floor [my apartment is on the fifth]. This has never happened before. – “I don’t know what this may mean.” – she said, upset. – “I lived on the sixth floor for nine years when I was between twelve and twenty-one . . . I still feel a bit lost these days [indicating, however, a decrease of confusion, I felt].” She has not been having dinner at all these days, and during the week-end, every time Charlotte stayed with her father, she didn’t have lunch either. She described this as if saying she doesn’t really know very well the meaning of having meals, as if she was still swaying between the decision to eat at all while alone or, I feel, rather starving herself into father’s grave, though joyfully, joining for ever, at long last, the glorious image he alone had always had of her and still keeps of her today. – “I don’t know whether I’m a joyful person . . . perhaps I am . . . ; well . . . no; I’m not . . . I don’t really know.” – as if she really couldn’t see where her [extraordinary capacity for] joy is really now rooted. DM: She has lost her mania, you see . . . JSM: I suggested that her being confused about her meals, if taken alone, as well as about her [famous] capacity for joy, seems to result from her hesitating whether she should decide to join her father for ever in order not to lose her goddess-like identity . . . – “But how am I joining him?” – “By going back again, together with Charlotte, into the house of Albert . . .” – “. . . ahhhhhh yes . . .” – “. . . which seems to represent your mother’s anal space, within which you really seem to have lived for such a long time, particularly between twelve and twenty-one, back again inside Albert’s dark house which surprised you so much by looking so familiar to you; how well you know all the gloom of that place, your mother’s anal promiscuous world, where you largely lived for all your adolescence, between

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twelve and twenty-one years, while living in the sixth floor, the upper floor where you stopped the lift today.” She smiled, and said: “But that’s the way you read it . . . Why the anal space? it could be the oral space, or whatever . . . it’s just theoretical.” DM: Now, the question, why the anal space is right because anus and vagina are simply not differentiated. JSM: I told her exactly that some time ago and she then told me how difficult it has always been for her, until recently, to differentiate both orifices; how confused they actually were in her mind. DM: They’re simply not differentiated. So, when you offer your vagina, promiscuously, you’re also offering your bottom, perversely, and so on . . . JSM: So I went on suggesting that “It was a promiscuous space; gloomy and dominated by confusion and indeed threatening – police cars everywhere; the bad man preventing you from coming to your session,. . . . You seem to have gone there just to visit the highly promiscuous Albert. There seems to refer to your lifelong problems of anality, of your intestines . . .” – “. . . oh yes . . .” – “. . . your constant diarrhea . . . Then you just went inside such a dark place so late in the night, so familiar to you. And you went with Charlotte, the incestuous child, so that the three of you could again, and this time for ever, at last, remain con-fused up, inside your mother, in a blissful state – no one and nothing outside that gloomy space, in real life, is of any interest for you anymore. This was also experienced by you, although in a different form, when you feel so attracted – and yet also so repulsed – by your mother’s house, feeling driven by the idea of staying there for ever, being, in fact, the second widow, but emotionally the true widow, really the only widow, thus suffering still deeper than your own mother your father’s loss, thus confirming your full right to be his own, real, true and only beloved wife. I still don’t understand the meaning of the dripping on your sofa but it also sounded very promiscuous . . .” – “. . . oh yes! It was terrible! What a chaos! . . .” While telling me something about her mother’s father, therefore her maternal grand-father, she slipped it into “my mother’s husband.” She noticed it, stopped, smiled, and then continued. She was again uncertain about whether she’s joyful, and I suggested: “I understand your being very confuse about your joy in so far as your intense capacity for joy seemed to be a vivid reflex of your bringing inside you the highest, most powerful penis in the world . . .” – “. . . ahhhh, yes . . .” – she agreed, smiling. – “However, as this penis died, you no longer know where your joy really is, where it is really rooted, what exactly is its source. That’s the meaning, I would think, of your slip about your mother’s husband. You feel lost about yourself because what you feel as the best part of yourself, that is, Charlotte, is still kept by your father, in Albert’s gloomy, promiscuous house. For as long

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as you would not separate him from that part of yourself still so deeply confused with you yourself, you can hardly mourn your father, I would believe.” – “In fact I don’t really know what to do, or with whom should I wish, or like, to be. It has always been clear for me with whom did I like to be and whom I didn’t but no longer now.” – she said, smiling sadly. At the end of the session she seemed to have had a serious glimpse at the importance of confusion in her entire life when she said: “I really don’t know who I am. My entire life can be put under one word: confusion. The story of my life is the story of a big, deep confusion about everything and everyone . . . and I really need help to clear this . . . I’m certainly unable to do it by myself. I’m helpless about my own deep confusion.” DM: Well, the point is: now, that she no longer is confused, but feels confused, you can let her sort it out herself. You don’t have to do so much talking, as you have had to do to show her the evidence that she is confused. Now that she has begun to feel it, you can relax a little and let her get on with sorting out her confusion. JSM: The next session she told me: “I don’t know what to do about my life. Charlotte is literally glued to me. We now always have some argument before I succeed in taking her out of my bed.” She’s worried about Charlotte’s behavior. “She now prefers to stay at home instead of going out with her friends. She doesn’t leave me” – “Charlotte would certainly feel that you are really not present, as I myself feel in your voice again today, here, in your session. You seem to be still hesitating whether you would rather join your father for ever, in his grave, in order not to feel deprived of that absolutely unique image of yourself that you imagine he had always had of you, paying farewell to the world outside, including Charlotte, as nothing in real life can ever be comparable to that god-like status, nothing being important for you any more . . .” – “. . . nothing is important for me any more . . . that’s true. I really don’t know to what I should attribute importance to . . . I really feel everything at a distance.” – “Yes, as I myself feel you here once again . . . yes . . . somehow you are at a distance . . . That’s exactly what I imagine Charlotte must feel: that you are no longer there. This seems why she is now ‘glued to you’, as you put it.” She told me that some of her friends did not behave quite well with her “and yet I don’t feel hurt . . . That’s a relief not to feel hurt. I just acknowledge that they are as they are, and don’t care.” – “Your not caring seems very ambiguous. It could be a movement of real understanding and tolerance, but it sounds to me, rather, as a movement of withdrawal, of constant, progressive renouncing of the world outside. It’s not tolerance; it’s indifference; it’s paying farewell to all of you there in this platitude of the world outside. You don’t know my joy . . .” – “Because I have my father inside me?” – “Yes. You seem puzzled. Because the person who had always held you in such a god-like esteem is now dead. So how can I still cling to his image of me if he is dead? You may nevertheless still hang

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on to the belief that the father whose golden penis you seem you have always had inside you stirring your triumph is still inside you. You still have the power to keep it inside you. So you should better join him now inside his grave, and nothing else could now attract you more.” The next session she arrived twenty minutes late. “I feel terribly exhausted . . . I have no strength to do anything. It was so difficult to come here . . . Yesterday I had such a painful fuss with Charlotte. I felt terribly sleepy at night, went to bed early but Charlotte didn’t leave me one second. She didn’t want to come out of my bed . . . And then I dreamed that I had married a Mr. [sic] aged sixty. He was tall, had white hair and looked like a [Portuguese painter she knows]. Everybody felt it so strange, really, saying that I have married an old man. Then, in my dream, we went together to the supermarket.” She went back to being perhaps more annoyed than upset about Charlotte’s behavior. I told her again how anxious Charlotte must be feeling her really withdrawn, absent, as I do often feel her as well in the sessions, as well as in her arriving twenty minutes late today without any palpable reason for being late but that ‘nothing is important for me any more in the outside world.’ She then mentioned all she has been doing with Charlotte – going to the cinema together, shopping, etc. – “but she pressures me all the time to do more things . . .” – “No matter how many things you may do with her, the truth is that, in your mind, nothing is important for you any more . . .” – “oh yes . . . that’s true . . . nothing, yes . . .” – “. . . and as you said, you don’t even know to whom, or what, should you attribute importance any more. So how could you expect Charlotte not to feel it keenly. But you may see, very clearly, in your dream, how Charlotte must feel, and how difficult it has been for you to come here today: you seem to have married your father before he had all those surgeries, when he was still ‘active’, that is, in your mind, before he became ‘impotent’, or more precisely, before you realized that your mother and your father had always really had, and still had then, a close intimate life, both before and after you were twelve and twenty-one; when you were still living on the sixth floor where you stopped the lift here the other day, thus showing how withdrawn you really seem to be, and confirming how distant I sometimes really hear you speaking to me in the last few sessions. The strangeness everybody felt about your marrying an old man . . .” – “. . . yes, I also felt it strange . . .” – “. . . all pointing to such an incestuous marriage. Little Sophie described him as ‘Mr.’ – I married a ‘Mr.’. So your dream seems to show a regression over the dream of the bad man who prevented you to come to your session . . .” – “. . . I didn’t understand that dream.” – “You were ‘caught’ in that beautiful area of Lisbon were your father worked, and where you spent so many hours of your adolescent life, between twelve and twenty-one, in paradise . . .” – “. . . yes . . . in paradise, really . . .” – “. . . so in your dream of today you seem to have decided to return to that particular area and to stay there, in that area, that is, in that state of mind, withdrawn from the world, with a ‘Mr.’ . . .” – “. . . I feel so bad that I would go with anyone whomsoever . . . ! I would be kidnapped

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. . . anything . . .” – “. . . and you went with him to the supermarket so joyfully, I felt . . .” – “. . . yes!!, yes! joyfully!” – she said, leaping back again, for a brief moment, to her former joy, or perhaps mania, or perhaps both, only to lose it the next minute – “. . . I always felt so happy in going with him [her father] everywhere . . . ! I don’t remember going with him to a supermarket . . . but I certainly went with him to the grocer . . .” DM: The point that I’m making is that you have got her through these two serious impediments to her mourning: the one of being in projective identification with her father’s penis, and the other of being inside her mother, encountering her father’s penis. And you have got her through that, and in touch with her mourning, and in touch with her confusion about her whole life . . . which has been dominated by this incestuous relationship with her father and that she has neglected her mother, and been horrible to her mother many times, and so on . . . Now, at this point, you really can leave her quite a lot to struggle with it, and to just sort of, you know, nudge her from one side to the other when she starts to go off in some manic way, or starts to fall into some depressive selfpity, to bring her back to the main course of the problem of her confusion, about who she is, what she can or cannot do, and what is the nature of her relationship with Charlotte, and that she is not a widow, she is not a wife, that she has no man that she loves . . . And she is going to think that she loves you like she loved her father and that of course is also not an adequate expression of her personality, it’s only a new version of a delusion which she has spread all over in her promiscuity. She has treated all these other men as if they were all father’s-penises, and so on, which you have made very clear to her. So, I mean, you have done very splendid work with her in relation to these two interferences with her mourning – being father’s penis, and being inside mother receiving father’s penis, and the way in which that it has expressed itself in the phantasy of joining him in grave, and so on . . . So you can now let her get on with struggling with it herself a bit, because she needs to do some of the work herself, you can’t just bottle-feed her . . . This is a question of really finding herself in the depressive position. And she needs to find herself now in the depressive position . . . It’s a matter of struggling out of her narcissism, you see . . . out of her manic delusions about herself. And, of course, the realization that she is so egocentric that she is not interested in other people. She is not even interested in Charlotte, she is only interested in Charlotte’s interest in her and that is part of her narcissism; and she has got hold of it now, and you can let her run with it. Do you fish? Do you do any fishing? JSM: No. DM: Well, when you fish and the fish takes the bait, a good fighting fish, you feel it, but you have to keep the line with a certain tension so that the fish can’t tear it out of its mouth. But also you can’t let it just go free, because then it will tangle it around anything it finds, and you’ll find that you have caught a tree

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instead of a fish. So, it’s a matter of keeping the tension effective. But not trying to do it for her because she’ll just feel that you’re prematurely trying to drag her into the boat . . . she’ll fight against it and will tear the hook out of her mouth, and be off, really. So, you have to be a bit more gentle with her now, and leave her to struggle to remind her of not only being confused but feeling confused . . . She has achieved this feeling confused. In the past, she has just been a confused person, and didn’t feel confused at all, felt quite omniscient and omnipotent. Of course, it’s a shame for her father to have to die for her to make this kind of progress.

CHAPTER 18 “. . . all her actions have to be listened to as if they were dreams . . .”

Summary The way out of severe states of projective identification may at times be full of trying difficulties. Some of these difficulties have already been examined in previous chapters. New ones will be now closely looked into. A particularly strong drive to act-out led Meltzer to advise to sometimes listen to reports of actions as if they were dreams, and therefore, to interpret actions as if they were dreams. This seems to enable the analyst to better approach aspects of the analysand’s personality which may otherwise remain recalcitrant to alternative approaches. The ways in which projective identification may hinder mourning is further discussed. It is hoped that this new though brief discussion may make the issue clearer.

JSM: She’s now suddenly back to life again, after nearly three months of an upsetting despondency and feelings of being lost and without direction in life. Though her many friends have been pressing her to go out, she has so far declined all their invitations. Now, for the first time in three months, she went to a party and was able to enjoy it, sounding very relieved and surprised with herself. The next day she went to the beach and again felt very well and again sounded very surprised with the change – “Last Saturday I dreamed that I was in a family party at aunt Carmo’s house.” Sophie likes aunt Carmo very much. “It was such a joyful party! I enjoyed so much being there, together with all my cousins. We used to haunt her house when I was a child.” Her voice sounding clean and bright, conveying a state neighbouring innocence. Recently her voice has changed; it’s now quite a clear voice, sounding more musical.

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DM: Hum-hum . . . Right. JSM: “In my dream I had two ages: I was a child – the time we played together in her house – and yet I also was an adult. Suddenly, Albert showed up in the party. I felt terribly frightened. What was that man suddenly doing there?! – I asked myself in my dream. Then my father resurrected and I entreated him: ‘Help me! I don’t know what to do with that man over there!’” “Last Tuesday I had a family dinner at aunt Carmo. I again did enjoy it so much” – she said, her voice sounding again quiet and really happy. “We took a long time just remembering so many events of childhood! Aunt Carmo told me again about her having occasionally fed me at the breast. I was a little embarrassed, but she said: ‘. . . you know, your mother was always late, and then you cried . . .’. It’s true . . . my mother was never in time; whatever her commitments, she was never in time.” In the session, as Sophie was evidently eager to speak, I decided just to keep listening to her. Last Saturday the baby of a very intimate, life-long male friend was baptised. “I learnt about the baptism this morning from a friend who was very surprised not to see me there. Sophie hates the mother of the baby who also seems to dislike Sophie. And yet, David, Florence, and Charlotte all attended the baptism, as well as quite a number of friends of her who are also friends of the couple, though far less intimate then Sophie to them. “I didn’t think of it the whole day but it was really strange, don’t you agree?” Suddenly, however, her tone of voice triggered off into her old, sadly famous, omnipotent indignation: “It’s incredible!! . . .” etc. Then she said: “Last Saturday I visited Rosemary [a good friend who has been ill] and spent such a quiet afternoon with her. For this reason I wouldn’t have attended the baptism anyway, but it’s just incredible that I have not been invited!! Don’t you agree?” – “It seems that your feelings about the baptism seem closely connected both with your old, sadly famous ‘incredible!!’, as well as with your dream . . .” – “How? . . .” – “On the one hand, there is your ‘I didn’t think of it the whole day” . . . – “. . . I really didn’t. I spent the whole day occupied with my things [very much sounding: quietly linked to her peaceful afternoon with Rosemary and to the pleasant Sunday she spent with her mother] . . .” – “. . . which seems linked with the joyful, innocent atmosphere of the family party of your dream, and the resurrection of your good father who now protects you against your masturbatory phantasies, represented by Albert, again threatening you. But then, all in a sudden, your famous ‘it’s incredible!!’ re-emerged, which is usually the voice of a wounded goddess, who do not bear be excluded by anyone whomsoever and from any place or event whatsoever, regardless of the motives that might have led your friends not to invite you. Your ‘incredible!!!’ seems linked to Albert whom you suddenly called into your dream.” – “But Albert is not Albert? . . . How could he have suddenly showed up in my dream? . . . it’s unbelievable . . . I’m not seeing him for such a long time . . .” – “. . . no, he did not show up in your dream: it was you who called him in; no, I believe Albert is of course not Albert; you seem to have made him into your daddy’s promiscuous

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penis, the privileged totem around which you have built up your omnipotence and most of your adolescent days from twelve to twenty-one. And back you are again to your hated mother-Rachel [the mother of the baby] and your attachment to her husband.” – “Its meaning [Albert] is still not very clear to me.” Then I recalled her of a promiscuous dream she recently had with Albert whose house she had gone to with Charlotte, late at night, now adding: “The ‘Albert who has interfered with your joyful, infantile inner world, full of clean affections . . .’” – “. . . that’s true . . . he really interfered with the party and spoiled everything, yes!” – “. . . and now interfering again with your true wish to separate him from your good father, preparing for truly mourning your father, cleaning the ‘party’ of your inner world, as it were, leaving him definitely outside, and restore, at last, your . . .” – “. . . oh yes! . . . restore . . . to restore my links with my mother is really now the most important thing in my life . . . I wish I could do it before she dies . . . she’s really the person who loves me the most [her voice still showing an undertone of surprise with her own relatively recent ‘discovery’ of her mother, after such a relentless, life-long war she had fiercely wage on her] . . . I have fought her for my whole life . . . how stupid . . . it was criminal . . . should I and Charlotte have been closer to her my whole life would certainly have been very different.” – “. . . to restore not only your relations with your mother, but with your siblings as well, as shown in the joyful, innocent family party of your dream. As your dream seems to show, you are now just beginning to mourn your father, beginning to both wish to be prepared and hopefully really being prepared to love him truly.” – “To love him?!” – “Yes” – “Didn’t I have love him so much for all my life?!” – “I don’t think you did.” – “Don’t you ever touch at my love for my father!!” – “Between you and your father it has always been ‘Albert’ . . .” – “. . . aaaaahhh . . . yes . . .” – “Before you can really put Albert really out of your internal party, and live this party as a true experience of joy and no longer as yet another fit of excitement – before you are prepared to do it, I don’t think you can know what really means to love your father. Standing behind your whipping the world around you with your sadly famous ‘incredible!!!’, whipped on anyone who might ever challenge your egocentricity and your grandiosity, there he always stood, feeding the goddess-like image you always wished to imagine he had of you, the goddess whose voice can still be easily heard threatening me in the form of: ‘Don’t you ever dare to touch at my love for my father!!’. I think that in your dream, your good father-analyst emerges, at long last . . . at very long last . . . But whether you are really prepared to keep him inside you, in your heart, guarding the joy of your youth, I do not know. You must really wish that your good fatheranalyst helps you sorting out these two sides of your father in your mind: the huge, promiscuous penis, that constantly feeds your sense of triumph and your arrogance, and the loving, caring father, whom you have really been striving, for all these years in your analysis, to allow to come to the front line of your internal world.” She’s now visiting her mother in what seems to me a quiet, tender, loving attitude, and no longer, I feel, in a state of mind of sharing, and really competing with her mother their mutual widowhood. However, I’m still worried with her

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because I still feel she keeps the sadly famous threatening undertone in her voice as an unmistakable indication, I fear, that her brutal omnipotence – that this brutal promiscuous fecal penis is still around, still lingering in her mind round the corner. DM: Hum . . . hum . . . Yes . . . this is really very, very good . . . The invasion of her happiness and enjoyment by the sado-masochistic masturbation phantasies is absolutely correct. And the omnipotence and grandiosity that it produces is the consequence of its always taking place inside the mother. Now, this item about aunt Carmo occasionally giving her the breast is something to keep your eye on, because that probably was felt by her as a terrific seduction against the mother . . . keep that in mind. JSM: I am really unquiet about her for I can unequivocally hear that undertone of “I’m above all,” though not yet fully in her dreams for now. But I would not be surprised if sooner rather than later she would again blow all this up again, thus blowing much of her work in analysis. DM: Well, she says to you: “Don’t you ever touch on my love for my father! That’s to be treated as sacred . . .” JSM: Yes, it is sacred, yes, because it is secret and forbidden and god-like and I alone carry it inside me. I can still hear in her voice the rattle of this god-like whip, as a back-drop tone, as if saying: if ever anyone would know of my incestuous relationship with father; if ever anyone would know about money ‘outside the country’, clandestine . . . , about his secret with me and how powerful I am, the whole world would burn in jealousy . . . it’s still frightening . . . it’s still mad, and I feel far from being sure that she has succeeded in overcoming it. DM: Yes, quite . . . and you really did it very, very well . . . JSM: And yet, I can now clearly feel her sincerity in the music of her voice so distinctly that even if she would have said it in Chinese, I would have been sure of her sincerity simply through the music of her voice. DM: . . . quite . . . quite (smiling in agreement) . . . JSM: And yet, the next minute or the next session, there she goes off once again back to her egocentricity and full blown grandiosity . . . This is very upsetting . . . DM: You have to say: “You’re bullying me . . . you’re threatening me, you’re being aggressive . . .” JSM: Oh, but I told her that so many times and she has always had a surprising response: she suddenly stops, feels astonished, repeatedly apologizes, sincerely,

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I feel, being quite clear that she hadn’t realized it, such the concreteness of the transference. DM: Yes, for she has suddenly switched from communication to acting in the transference. JSM: So she suddenly leaps out of communication and acts in the transference . . . and an interpretation may often bring her suddenly back into communication again, as it has been happening time and again, yes . . . She then went back to the episode of the baptism. This took us the whole session. I answered all her “don’t you think? questions.’ They were mostly formulated in an intimate tone. During the session, however, I felt somehow uneasy about both my answering her questions and even elaborating on them, thus yielding to comment on external events related to this baptism, supporting her in all it seemed to me she was quite right. As the session evolved I felt increasingly uneasy about my behavior, watched myself a few times trying to understand what was going on with me, but I simply didn’t understand what was it that seems sliding out of my control. The next session she said: “Yesterday I felt so wearied and confused about everything . . . I’m very insecure about going with Charlotte for holidays all alone. I feel terribly lonely; I felt deserted . . . I feel the need to leave for holidays sooner, perhaps already next week [two weeks earlier than the settled time]. I wept, all alone, for a very long time. This morning I had a terrible colic as I cannot remember having had for years! – a colic like those I used to have before, with diarrhea. It lasted for more than an hour. I couldn’t stop it. I had just enrolled Charlotte for her next term at school. Then, suddenly, the colic exploded [describing it as though she had just been viciously attacked by something or someone]. I had to rush to the cafe nearest the school . . . in the end I felt exhausted.” I suggested that it all really seemed to be linked with the last session – and I revised, once again, my having felt uneasy about the session, and only then did I realize that I simply must have seriously slipped away from the analytic position. So I told her: “I think I am responsible for the way you felt as I slid away from my strict analytic relation with you in the last session into commenting on this and that about the baptism and . . .” – “. . . aaaahhhh . . . and you said that Rachel’s behavior [the wife of her intimate friend and mother of the baby] was inhumane . . .” – “Yes . . . you are right. I actually thought she was, but it really had nothing to do with your analysis . . .” – “. . . and I felt still more abandoned.” – “You are right in feeling abandoned as shortly after having lost your father, you now, suddenly, felt as if you’ve lost your analyst. That’s also why, it seems to me, you suddenly feel so insecure about leaving alone with Charlotte for holidays: during your stay out, you would not feel sure about where, exactly, I would be in your mind.” She seemed relieved and her tense voice sounded immediately back to normal. However, such an acute colic and prolonged diarrhea, and the fact that it has all blasted off immediately after her having enrolled Charlotte, remained obscure for me. She then told me that Charlotte didn’t want to attend the course of Moral. This is an optional

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course. “But I enrolled her anyway.” – “Why?” – “Because the teacher of Moral is excellent . . . it was recommended by a priest I know . . . my nephew [who studied in the same college] said he is a fantastic teacher . . .” Some two years ago she was thrilled about this priest. It was he who, recently, baptised one of her nieces’ baby. Sophie seemed ambiguously close to him. She occasionally attends the priest’s service of the mass and asked to talk to him. DM: About what? JSM: About nothing. So much so that the priest, who couldn’t understand what she really wanted from him, put a gentle, but firm, end to her requests to talk to him. Then I suggested that “Your enrolling Charlotte in this course seems related to your phantasies about the priest.” – “I don’t know . . . did I make anything wrong? . . . perhaps I did . . .” – “Just like the priest not knowing what you really wanted from him, I am also not sure about where exactly I am in your mind, after having taken sides with matters I really know nothing about and surely should not have commented on even if I knew anything about” . . . DM: Quite . . . This is certainly making a priest of you and excluding Carmo from your life . . . it’s her attitude toward you . . . (silence) . . . When you say that you’re not at all sure about “where exactly I am in your mind,” that’s quite correct. She doesn’t know whether you are in her mind or she is in your mind . . . she is confused, as she says . . . C: What do you think about this diarrhea, the baptism and the baby, and her being excluded from the party-family, the party-family of the analyst, and after the brutal diarrhea destroying the baby? DM: In my mind, the friend who is mother of this baby has excluded her because, like aunt Carmo, she is a baby stealer . . . and doesn’t trust her with the baby. She will steal it, she will claim it’s hers . . . they’ll submit the case to Solomon and he will say: “Cut the baby in half” . . . JSM: I have the feeling that Rachel didn’t invite her simply because she’s really a trouble maker and does hate Rachel out of pure jealousy. The diarrhea, I would believe, seems to describe her aborting the baby she may have felt that we both might have made in this entirely “social talk” about Rachel and the baptism, now revenging on Rachel and her husband defecating their baby in both confusion and rage. DM: Possibly, yes . . . JSM: . . . and being a (famous) trouble-maker, she would “easily” abort that baby by turning the party up-side down . . . she would easily “diarrhea” that baby.

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DM: Yes . . . JSM: As she again briefly alluded to her recent colic in a tone of voice very much as if asking me what I thought about its meaning, I suggested that she may have enrolled Charlotte in that course because she felt very confused about my behavior in the previous session and . . . “. . . Wednesday [the day of the week she stopped coming to her analysis because of the arrangement we made to accommodate her four sessions weekly. Since then, Wednesday has turned into an endless source of trouble and unrest for her]; Wednesday” – she went on – “I met the director of the class of Charlotte who is also her teacher of Mathematics. I was furious with her . . . furious about the things she told me.” – “What did she tell you?” – “. . . hannnn? . . . what did she tell me?! . . .” – “Yes” – “She told me . . . she’s a beast!! . . . she told me that Charlotte is irregular in her behavior! . . . she’s not! She got four [out of five] in the test of Math, but it was an excellent mark in view of the terrible classifications the whole class got! She told me that she had a fantastic test but she couldn’t count on her as she’s irregular. I was furious! . . . four is a good mark . . . She also told me that I force her to study. It isn’t true! ‘Oh no?’ – said the teacher. ‘Oh, I’m sorry . . .’; she’s a beast! I was astonished when Charlotte began behaving badly at school but I’m sure she never exceeded any limits [we have of course discussed many times how Sophie herself had always exceeded all limits about everything she possibly could all along her own life, ever since she was four]. I couldn’t conceive her doing it!” – “Why?” – “Because I need her to be regular.” – “What if Charlotte starts getting zeros instead of fives?” She was suddenly disturbed and uttered unclear words as if she had just received a shock – “What” – I continued – “What if Charlotte would start behaving more like the way you yourself have always behaved for your entire life, and therefore, quite against all you have always carefully imposed upon her?” – “. . . I think I would really go crazy . . .” – she said, in a serious, worried tone – “You see how critically it has always been for you – not for Charlotte – that she behaves like she does as a container for your own addiction to limitless, in order to save you from becoming crazy, while you yourself continue to reign in your own mother’s inside? Then you seem to impose upon Charlotte the heavy task of being the best guardian of your sanity.” – “But I couldn’t have imposed it on her! It’s just natural in her . . .” – “How do you know? How desperately did you have just now insisted that four was an excellent mark and that her teacher is a beast!! just because she dared to tell you that Charlotte was irregular in her performances . . . how deceived you think your father would be if only Charlotte would not be perfect . . . Who, exactly, is Charlotte?” – “But she’s fully interested in all her courses.” – “When, however, she was first not accepted in a school, a few years ago, she kept repeating, for several days, in a real panic: ‘mother, do you still love me?, ‘mother, do you still love me?’” – “But she’s much better now” – she said, both upset and anxious – “I know. In the last two or three years of your analysis, she appears to feel much freer, I feel.” – “That morning [when she enrolled Charlotte in that class and got a serious colic] I got myself all smeared . . . all down my legs . . . I had to have a

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shower . . . just as it used to happen long ago.” – “It seems to me that, as you felt so abandoned and so confused as a result of having, first, lost your father, and then, I myself had slid away from a session . . .” – “. . . how?” – “By having indulged in commenting with you on events which had nothing to do with your analysis . . .” – “. . . yes . . . you shouldn’t have given your opinion . . .” – she said, now gently – “You are right, I shouldn’t, in fact.” – “I felt such a huge power as you supported me so intensely . . . I could have burst out with power [against both parents of the new born baby] . . . but I didn’t . . .” – “. . . feeling emboldened by your father’s golden penis, yes, who you may have again heard telling you that the sun shines for you; so as you felt abandoned, you seemed to have shielded yourself back into your full identification with Charlotte as your father’s perfect child of a perfect incestuous liaison. That’s why, I think, you felt so disturbed with her teacher. Again, you desperately reach out for protection, for you yourself, not for Charlotte.” DM: Yes, it’s very hard to support her without her immediately getting inside you, and becoming very powerful. JSM: “And so you have enrolled Charlotte-Sophie in the course of Moral lectured by that nice priest just against her will. She therefore is not interested in all courses, as you said.” DM: Right. JSM: “I don’t think so . . . the course of Moral is so important.” – “For you yourself, not for Charlotte. . . .” – “. . . but I’m better now. Last year I didn’t hesitate: I entered her inscription at once. Now I really hesitated very much.” – “I wonder whether you would have enrolled Charlotte in that course at all if only Tuesday session would have not been so disturbing for you.” – “. . . aaaahh . . . in fact . . . yesterday, when I left the session, I met Charlotte but decided to cancel her registration in that course . . . However, only next morning did I decide to put her back into it though still hesitating very much . . .” – “. . . between enrolling Charlotte, or yourself.” – and she agreed. But the full meaning of her severe diarrhea still remained undealt with. So she seems to feel disturbed about my having slipped into answering her questions and out of the analytic frame, and then jerked back, as it were, into projective identification with both Charlotte and the priest. DM: Yes. It’s again self-idealization, which includes the idealization of Charlotte, the idealization of her father and of her relation with her father, which she feels that you are threatening . . . it’s the approach of the holiday, of course . . . (silence) . . . She is a difficult borderline psychotic girl . . .

CHAPTER 19 Projective identification into the internal mother may infuse into the subject’s hemorrhoids such an intensely colored pathological life

Summary Important new steps were taken in working out infantile zonal confusions between orifices and functions, these confusions being once again closely associated with projective identification, and in particular, it seems, with a sudden relapse into the internal mother’s anal world.

JSM: “Last Monday I dreamed that there was a naked man in my room. Then a second man, also naked, came in. It was a terribly wearing dream. I woke up terribly tired and anxious, and had to quickly get rid of these men.” In her dream her mother presided over the table at lunch. “Then I dreamed that Isaacs” – a friend of hers and a public figure whom she respects and has never been involved with – “was looking at my shoes and told me how beautiful they were. They were brown and round. I often meet Isaacs at a restaurant having lunch with such mysterious people. It’s quite clear that he doesn’t want me to listen to their conversations. He is our best expert in Communism.” – “An expert, therefore, in the secret and clandestine side of . . .” – “. . . oh no. He is just fascinated with the history of the Communist parties and of Communism.” – “‘It’s quite clear that he doesn’t want me to listen to their conversations’, you said. In the secret areas of the Communist parties people live in absolute coolness and secrecy even among parents, siblings, wives, husbands, in a paranoid atmosphere, as you know . . .” – “. . . oh, that’s absolutely true, yes; and then, in my dream, he praised my shoes. I looked at them and I really found them very pretty. There are no such shoes in Portugal. Last Sunday I went to a shopping-center with Jeremy and Charlotte and wished to show him shoes I recently saw and I liked very much but didn’t buy. In my dream the shoes weren’t there anymore.” – “It seems to me that Isaacs, in your dream, is praising your genital . . .” – “. . . oh, you once told me about that

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connection . . .” – she added, excitedly, adding at once: – “Isaacs once told me that he was planning to write a book on treachery, and this may mean quite a lot.” – “I think that it may mean ‘infidelity’, ‘unfaithfulness’ . . .” – “. . . about what?” – “You seem to be planning to betray Jeremy by sliding back into an adolescent state of mind by exhibiting your shining genital to a secretive man who is planning to write a book on treachery, thus repairing your frustration of the week-end with Jeremy. Then you seem to have gone a little further back into the edge of promiscuity of an orgasmatic nature . . .” – “. . . yes . . . I felt so bad and so wearied.” – “But then there was mother-analyst whom you summed to your dream in order to contain your infantile drive to get inside the promiscuous dancing, the orgasmatic inside of the mother where you seem to have lived for such a long time, now competing with Charlotte. ‘There are no such shoes in Portugal’, you said. Yours are unique.” DM: Right . . . I am sure it’s all quite correct, really. Quite! JSM: “These two shoes, in your dream, seem to stand for the two holes, the vagina and the anus, the brown and secretive and treacherous side of your infantile mental organization.” DM: Yes . . . it’s all under the edges of confusion of zones, of nipples, of penis, vagina, anus . . . it’s all excited erotic confusion, yes. JSM: I had to cancel her Friday session and offered her an alternative hour on Wednesday. Last week-end there was a big, merry meeting of poets, a sort of contest between poets. Each poet is expected to respond to one another in improvised verse. Harold, himself a well-known poet and an occasional lover of Sophie, was the star of the meeting. – “Last night I dreamed that a similar contest has taken place in the form of a party. In this party, however, the only poet was Harold. There were more people present but they all looked more like students. There was also a woman – Catherine – a fat woman who Harold summoned to the stage. I felt terribly uneasy as I did not really know where exactly in the room was my place, where I could sit or have to stand, whether I would be accepted there at all, whether I was allowed to be at the highest level of the meeting. I eventually left but felt very unwell.” I suggested that she felt that she was not at the level of the party where my wife and I – Catherine and Harold – had been last Friday, this being why I’ve cancelled her session, and that she made Catherine fat as a slight revenge for not being at the level of having my attention. In her dream, I also suggested, she seems to have made a real effort to shuffle off the infantile dispute over who really rules mother’s inside, bringing herself into a less grandiose, more adolescent-like kind of conflict: the students who were not at the high level, not knowing where, in the room, she may be allowed to stay, etc., therefore accepting that the adolescent-student Sophie still has to grow into adulthood and in any case leave this long lasting “contest” concerning mother’s

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inside and celebrated father. – “Eventually, I believe, you left the meeting, that is, you seem to have yielded to the cancellation of your Friday hour, but felt very unwell for having accepted the alternative hour of Wednesday for students, as it were.” – which she confirmed. – “You felt unsure as what is your real place in the room, in my mind and affection, whether you could dethrone Catherinemother away from Harold-daddy’s love but you nevertheless seem to have accepted it instead of crashing me-daddy down the sewer in the form of a diarrhea.” DM: Right, ok. JSM: After her session she was going to see her enterologist as she feels persuaded that she had hemorrhoids. Her doctor, however, reassured her that there were no signs of hemorrhoids. Quite surprisingly, however, she was really irritated with her doctor, whom however she has been so attached to for so many years. What stirred her irritation was her doctor finding no hemorrhoids at all. She even resisted accepting his negative diagnosis. DM: Now why? Why did she resist being told that she had no hemorrhoids? JSM: I didn’t understand and I asked her what . . . DM: . . . why do I have this feeling in my anus? It’s an erotic feeling, that’s why. Is not hemorrhoids, it’s an erotic excitement in your anus. JSM: She then dreamed that she was in the garden of Aunt Carmo, “a garden I haunted when I was a little child. In my dream I felt that I was in my mother’s house and I asked my mother whether I could stay with Jeremy for the night. When I woke up, pleased with my dream, I thought: ‘what a silly idea! I could have never asked such a question of my mother. She would certainly say “no”’.” In a second dream of that night I dreamed that Edward [one of her last promiscuous ex-lovers], visited me in my office. This was all I remember about my second dream. And yet, this second dream was terribly disquieting.” She offered no further associations. I nevertheless suggested that the first dream seems to show little Sophie, aged perhaps four or five, asking her mother permission to wrench from her your father’s golden penis, instead of fighting her to death as you have done for your entire life.” DM: Yes . . . Really, “can I sleep with daddy tonight?” JSM: But I was still unsure about the transferential meaning of her dream. I refrained from phrasing it as if she was asking me: “Would it be possible for me to stay with you during that missing week in September [which I have untimely cancelled], mother, making sure that you and daddy will not have new babies? For this would have soothed my anxiety.”

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DM: Yes . . . (long silence) . . . I suspect this Edward is very fond of anal intercourse. It links back with the hemorrhoids . . . (long silence) . . . JSM: Yes, about her being annoyed with her doctor who found no evidence whatsoever of her having hemorrhoids. Concerning her second dream, it seems to allude, I suggested, to her drive to masturbate through the promiscuous Edward as a gratification of some frustration you may gone through with Jeremy that very night. To what precise extent may the frustrations with Jeremy may root in her frustrations never to be allowed to really make love to daddy . . . DM: . . . yes . . . quite . . . JSM: . . . but I do not know . . . DM: . . . yes . . . (silence) . . . I would however be more concerned about infantile anal elements. JSM: Yes, yes . . . For the next dream seems to confirm your view. “Last Saturday I had several dreams but forgot them all. Last night I dreamed that I was with Henry [her eldest brother whom she has always been fond of] in a house, and the house was going to be taken by assault. I was defenseless and woke up in anxiety. Then I dreamed that there was a child, who could be Charlotte, who was imprisoned together with other children. It was terrible. I said to someone nearby that it would be better for them to have tea with me but they returned to prison. It was yet another awful dream.” DM: Yes . . . This is still about the hemorrhoids, really. JSM: . . . yes . . . they went back to prison instead of accepting her doctor’s diagnosis feeling freed from that persecutory phantasy, yes . . . DM: These are all little babies in her bottom and the assault on her bottom. JSM: Her “it could be Charlotte” made me think of her recalling how painful it may have been to “defecate” her . . . DM: . . . yes . . . “. . . imprisoned together with other children” . . . this is the infantile conception of the inside of the mother full of babies. JSM: With a graphic precision, it seems . . . DM: . . . quite . . . JSM: . . . muddling up anus and vagina and of course the nature of mother’s inside. Someone stole my babies from my rectum identified with mother’s.

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DM: Quite . . . JSM: Saturday she stayed with Jeremy for the night at his home. Jeremy was very depressed and withdrawn as he seems to realize how unsatisfactory their sexual life may have been for Sophie. This is due, Sophie now told me, to the fact that Jeremy has a very little, thin penis. He had often told her about it in the beginning of their relationship and he was very worried. “Now he feels depressed as he notices my bewilderment. I cannot tell him that this is really why I feel so frustrated. He already has so many problems. But I really felt depressed the whole week-end because of this. He then told me that we really have a serious problem but perhaps it is too soon to end a relationship like that. Perhaps we may find a solution for this. He realizes that I do not have orgasms with him. But I don’t really know whether I have ever had an orgasm . . .” DM: . . . that’s the truth . . . Having an orgasm is just a bit of mythology for her, whether she has ever experienced an orgasm except in masturbation. JSM: “I don’t know what an orgasm is. Is it so important to have an orgasm all the time? Maybe we can have other kinds of satisfaction. I really had more pleasure with other men. His sex really is a problem. Sometimes I cannot even feel it. I was so sad. I wept the whole Sunday. Is this unsolvable? Perhaps it isn’t; perhaps we can find some solution. I really like him very much. He has other things which are so good. He’s tender, sweet . . . I don’t want at all to end this relationship. I was going to buy a wider bed by now.” She repeatedly said: “I don’t know what to do” – feeling really sad and upset. I suggested that this question may mostly be related with her infantile phantasies about her father’s huuuuuge penis and her attachment to this idea . . . DM: . . . that’s right . . . JSM: . . . which has so often been discussed in her analysis, and I added: “This may perhaps move to the fore more clearly and quietly in your coming dreams.” DM: Right! Very good! . . . It’s quantity; this way of thinking about quantities, which includes this talk about orgasm, and the size of the orgasm . . . It’s all masturbatory, really; having sex, and not making love. And this is a big anal element, and her wish to be assaulted, really . . . assaulted by the huge penis. JSM: Yes, yes . . . the house with Henry which is about to be assaulted . . . DM: . . . quite.

CHAPTER 201 An acting in the counter-transference re-enacted in the course of a supervision session

Summary Two consecutive new severe crises brought Sophie’s analysis to yet another predicament. Taken together, both these crises made it disappointingly clear that her privileged way of “. . . sending everybody to hell still is to shit them out and flush them down the drain.” Anal sadism seemed therefore anxiously resorted to as an infantile response to trying experiences. The analyst too may at times be tried beyond his powers. Indeed, “when all the [patient’s, in a dire condition] hopes for being able to live a life that is not a torment are invested in the analysis” things touch an odd point. Material related to Sophie’s experience of being identified with the placenta now emerged. This material was related to some of her recent toilet habits, as well as to the way she seems to make use of the telephone. “This” – Meltzer remarked about much of the material of this supervision session – “is all material in which she is the placenta.” NB: Two years later.

JSM: When she began her relationship with Jeremy, since I have known him for many years, even if I have hardly seen him at all for the last twenty years or so, but still think that he is a decent and educated man, I felt really pleased and must have somehow passed these feelings to her. She evidently felt it. However, their relationship soon soured amidst an emotional storm of troublesome events. Her analysis then quickly slid into a very puzzling stage. For about two full years her sessions suddenly turned into a most disheartening, repetitive sort of

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infinitely tedious rigmarole. She would go on ad nauseam through exactly the same uninteresting episodes, bringing no dreams, no associations, nothing that might suit analysis, sometimes driving me not only infinitely bored, but mad with her. Session after session, her analysis remained conspicuously eventless. The main theme as well as its variations turned mostly around her conflict with the president of her office. I was quite unable to understand what was really going on, and was of course unable to drive her out of this. This lasted for two full years. The following session, however, shows her hinting at the end of this. DM: Right. JSM: “Last Saturday I recalled so vividly my dreams, decided to write them down, which in fact I hadn’t done for about two years, but now I forgot them. Yesterday I was just about to call you . . . I had such a terrible nightmare . . . everything was crumbling down; the floor opened down right before me and all the people in the room fell down through this terrible hole . . .” DM: Which is really a toilet dream . . . it’s her vengefulness, her anal vengefulness that is connected with her diarrhea and her colics . . . her sending everybody to hell is still to shit them out. Why she hasn’t done that with you, she has only threatened and threatened but she never actually, you know, pull the chain and let you go down the drain, isn’t yet clear. JSM: I think that she keeps a relatively strong link to me, some kind of trust, of confidence, even perhaps beyond transferential matters, I feel. DM: Well, it has to do with her aura of what she thinks are intellectual men. This is the very girlish feminine aura of the daddy with a big brain, which is hardly differentiated from the big testicles . . . It’s imagination, you see, the daddy with a big imagination . . . Well, let’s go on . . . it’s very interesting material. JSM: “That evening [the following night when she dreamed about the floor opening up right before her], Charlotte told me at dinner that every time David fetches her at home he brings with him his little daughter. I think he shields himself from me [behind his little daughter] just in case I show up. He therefore throws his daughter at my face. He did this after the quarrel we recently had about money, I think . . . he must feel very guilty. Tuesday morning I felt ill. I was going to have a meeting with Harold [an occasional lover of hers, a well-known writer and scholar, and a very influential man. cf. Sophie’s dream around this figure in Chapter 19] and I was terrified thinking that I would say only silly things, and that he would be fed up with me.” – referring, I think, to the two last years and her fears that I might have lost all interest in her. DM: Quite.

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JSM: She then went on telling me, once again, the terrible things that people at her office do to her, “that they are all the time demoting me . . .” “After the meeting with Harold, I minutely reviewed the whole conversation we had and was worried about the many uninteresting things I said and all those I should have said but didn’t. Tomorrow I will meet my lawyer to see what I should do about the [‘persecutory’] attitudes people in my office are all the time concocting against me. What do you think?” – “I think that you have been reviewing the last two years of analysis and you seem to feel that I will now demote you, feeling fed up with you about the many uninteresting things you have said all along this time. So I am also unbearably ‘demoting’ you by bringing my little daughter, throwing her at your face, showing you . . .” – . . . “. . . it’s just inhumane! I wished to have more children and he just throws her at my face! . . .” – . . . “. . . then the whole world crumbled down; you blew up in a fury and you suddenly made the floor open up wide right before you and you just ‘diarrhea’ them down out of your sight.” – “Yes . . .” – she surprisingly said, now calmed down. – “I really was impatient with you last Tuesday” – I said – “and this may have sounded to you as if I was saying: ‘now I have a nice new little daughter, so leave me alone with her! Besides, my little nice daughter does not bother me like you have been doing all this time’. So you then were very worried about being incapable of saying enough interesting things to hold my interest, to retrieve it. Furthermore, I had recently left little Sophie for holidays, and now, just imagine! David’s and Florence’s new baby torturing you ‘inhumanely’.” – “While listening to you I was recalling what a terrible effort I always made every time I was talking with my father not to say too many silly things, fearing that he could lose all his interest in me . . .” – . . . “. . . seducing him, therefore . . .” – . . . “. . . yes . . . trying very hard indeed to keep his interest in me alive . . . how could I possibly interest him? He knew so much more than I . . . I was vividly recalling it while listening to you . . . but in fact I was never really sure that he was interested in what I was saying, whatever interesting things I could possibly succeed in telling him . . . how could he . . . ? . . .” DM: . . . (long silence) . . . Yes, it’s all transference material . . . So she is aware that she has been boring you. What she is not aware is that it is intended to disappoint you . . . It is your punishment . . . Now, what did you do to deserve this punishment? JSM: Now I suddenly realized, as I was just reading this report to you, that she may have felt my enthusiasm about handing her to Jeremy . . . DM: . . . that’s right, yes! . . . JSM: . . . probably meaning that I wasn’t interested in her anymore, that I really have had other babies far more interesting than her, so I’m pushing her away to Jeremy, trying to get rid of her: “Leave me alone with my wife and my new baby! Go to Jeremy!” . . .

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DM: Yes. JSM: So she has just been acting in the transference what she thought was my feeling sick of her . . . She did make me endure what she felt I was doing to her . . . Furthermore, she did not accept seeing her daddy having any interest in seeing her married with another man. She wishes him burning with jealousy . . . DM: Quite! She felt you were handing her over for political purposes, like the king hands the daughter over because he wants to make an alliance with the king of the next country. The king would just use his daughter, really, prostitute his daughter for political purposes. JSM: What a pity . . . what a waste of time . . . two full years punishing me for this . . . DM: Well, well . . . well . . . it could have been shortened but not much . . . it probably couldn’t be very, very much . . . it is related to her father’s death, which obviously released her from some sort of thraldom to him . . . (silence) . . . The grievance against David on the grounds that she wanted more children, as if he had deprived her of more children. That is probably the way in which her father . . . [INAUDIBLE] ... JSM: The next session she told me: “I spent an idle week-end doing nothing useful. Harold didn’t call me and Charlotte went abroad. I dreamed that I had an instant connection with her via internet.” I suggested that “if father leaves little Sophie alone at home and goes out with mother making new babies, you still feel in need of getting in contact with him through ‘the best part of you’, the perfect Charlotte-Sophie, believing that at least the Charlotte-side of you would interest him.” – “Tomorrow I’m going to see my lawyer . . . I’m definitely going to quit my office . . . I can’t tell anyone that Charlotte went abroad . . .” – “Why?” – “Because people will be envious of her.” – “Why envious?” – “Everyone who has children would be envious of her . . . Should I tell this to your friend Elisa, she would die of envy.” In this session I told her that I had been thinking for some time now that by next Christmas we should perhaps begin to think of a date to end her analysis. However, she was just astounded, making little sense of her thoughts. – “I understand that you must be fed up with me . . . I have really been very repetitive . . . I wished I could get cured . . . My mother had always said that I was quite unbearable and that I will never meet anyone who will stand me . . .” DM: Yes, it’s still very concrete. You won’t marry her, you won’t give her the babies. She cannot understand the difference between adult and infantile.

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JSM: I made this suggestion for many reasons. First, in the perhaps too optimistic expectation that maybe if she faces the concrete possibility of bringing her analysis to an end in a year or two, she might perhaps start working more seriously, and also she could come out of this repetitive pattern, which worries me . . . DM: Yes, well . . . It’s like Freud giving the wolf man a termination date for his analysis, irreversible, and so on . . . always has the opposite effect, really. So, it’s unfortunate . . . Even though you said: “Perhaps, begin to think,” . . . well, she doesn’t hear the “perhaps” . . . the “begin to think” . . . she only hears: “Next Christmas, we will end your analysis!” JSM: She rather took it as I was telling her: “Right now!” . . . DM: Yes, yes, Christmas is today . . . JSM: And I went on and on, repeating this “perhaps,” the possibility of, how important it would be for her to think if and when; to consider a tentative date next year . . . “No, you want me to go now! I’m not interesting for you any more . . .” DM: Yes . . . Well, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work that way. All the perhapses, and all the begin to thinks . . . it doesn’t cut any ice at all . . . JSM: I was really astonished with her reaction, absolutely taking my words for “immediately!”; “irrevocably!”; “irreversible,” “order!”, as if I had thrown my sword to her feet: “GO NOW!” DM: Yes, of course. When the time comes that you have to propose that the patient and you agree about a tentative date for ending the analysis, they don’t hear the “tentative” . . . The result is that it gets extended . . . yes, it gets extended . . . Apparently is extremely difficult for people to relinquish the analytic situation when all their hopes for being able to live a life that is not a torment is invested in the analysis. They haven’t yet internalized it, it’s still an external thing, and it’s still attached to you, concretely, as the analyst. It is not even felt to be the mess that they’re attached to, or the couch they’re attached to, it is you, concretely. And it still means that you have to be her husband, nothing else will do. No, this is not love, this is tyranny, really . . . And it comes from this terrible attachment to father, it’s like the opera Turandot, in which all the ties had to be cut off by this woman who was still attached to her father. No man will be good enough. Mother says that she’s unbearable, meaning that no man will be good enough to compare with her father in her view of her father, not her mother’s view of her father. JSM: Yes, she used to say, very clearly: “No man ever can be compared with my father, of course. How could he?” And the concrete force of her of course is really

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terrible . . . she uttered it from the very top of Mount Olympus, as a most irrevocable pronouncement. DM: He was a god. JSM: Absolutely . . . I often came to refer to him as “Zeus” . . . DM: Zeus, yes . . . these humanizing gods having babies with all the other women in the world. JSM: The next session she looked depressed and worried. She described the interview she had, at her own earnest request, with the president of her office where she has been working for the last nine years. According to her own description she herself was extremely arrogant with him, calling him – in a real shout, I think – hypocritical, dishonest, and liar. A few days afterwards she was called by one of the lawyers of the office and was just fired. DM: Right. So, there is a clear piece of acting out . . . If she really let loose her abuse, he would fire her. But she is much too careful to be abusive, she can only break your heart by disappointing you. JSM: This “hypocritical, dishonest, and liar” is, of course, directly addressed to me, but . . . DM: . . . yes, it’s addressed to you, these imaginative mind-testicles, who go around, giving babies to everybody but her . . . You liar! Hypocrite! JSM: “Yesterday someone brought me the proofs of the book [she had been working on for some time] but I just sent him away!” “‘The book should already have been here for a month! So I don’t want to see you any more!’, I said to him.” She also told me of a real uproar she made just because of some trifle at the stand where she had just bought a new car. She is, however, worried about her reactions, particularly about the scene she made with the president of the well-known Law office whom she had been working with. The following days she was really worried about herself and depressed, saying that she was getting crazy, that she badly needed my help, being really concerned about her mental state. DM: Ok. JSM: What you mean by “ok”? DM: Well, she realizes that she is behaving in a very crazy way, that it’s not just offending everybody but giving everybody the impression that she is deranged, mentally deranged, getting crazy.

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JSM: But all this is of course her response to my mistake . . . DM: . . . well . . . she is quite crazy, really. The concreteness of her incestuous relationship with her father is due to a projective identification with mother. It’s a real delusion that she is mother, which she enacts with Charlotte, being the placenta that is attached to Charlotte by this umbilical cord, and Charlotte is still an unborn baby inside her. JSM: So Charlotte would have the concrete meaning of the placenta? DM: She herself . . . and therefore it’s quite mysterious that Charlotte can go to Germany . . . People would be envious of her for having such a long umbilical cord that can allow Charlotte to go to Berlin. C: And perhaps she was afraid that the envious people would cut that umbilical cord . . . DM: Yes, yes, and would take Charlotte away from her; seduce Charlotte away from her . . . JSM: “Now, when I’m in the toilet, it’s so difficult for me to leave it . . . I keep on sitting, rolling and rolling and rolling the paper [in her hands]; just like as I do while being at the telephone . . . it’s so unhealthy.” She also complained of feeling the need to go to the toilet to urinate when she is just about to fall asleep. “It’s awful . . . it’s maddening! It’s as if I didn’t wish [I would be afraid of?] to allow myself into sleep [entering sleep?]!” DM: . . . (long silence) . . . This is all material in which she is the placenta. And these are the endless activities of the placenta, with this long toilet paper roll . . . the umbilical cord . . . which she is constantly rolling and unrolling . . . It’s equivalent to an endless conversation . . . There’s something developing here that has to do with the fear of falling asleep . . . (silence) . . . So her psychosomatic state with her intestines, and her mental state with her delusions, is coming together . . . and it becomes very clear that you are her toilet-mummy. (reads) “Every time that I go to the telephone I’ll tell someone that I quit my job. I feel at once a colic and have to rush to the toilet” . . . So it’s quite clear that, what ordinarily might be experienced as a need for the toilet, or a need for the mother, is only expressed psychosomatically, as an incipient diarrhea. Now, you might say: “an incipient diarrhea is the same as a need for toilet.” No, it’s not the same. The relationship to the toilet, properly, is one of life’s pleasures, of defecating into the toilet that receives it happily, and flushes it away making flushing sounds of pleasure. This is a perversion of the toilet relationship, squirting diarrhea, the toilet feeling soiled and abused, made smelly, etc. . . . So, it’s not a good relationship to the toiletmummy. It’s also connected with this endless talking, this long toilet roll that she rolls and unrolls . . .

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C: Perhaps this is a repetition of her way of entering her mother’s anus, something like she does with people over the telephone . . . DM: . . . (silence) . . . Well, it’s not necessarily acting out in the sense of promiscuity. It’s more acting out in terms of reversing of the meaning of the toilet relationship. Instead of it being a pleasure, or a relief, to a welcoming and willing toilet, it’s a tormenting, soiling of the toilet, and a painful diarrhea . . . C: It seems that there is no sense of time . . . she is rolling and unrolling the toilet paper, like in the claustrum, there is no time . . . DM: Well, the time is this roll of toilet tissue, which is potentially experienced as endless . . . JSM: . . . just like the two years of repetitive. . . . DM: . . . quite . . . JSM: . . . and the concrete soiling of my mind as toilet-breast, maddening me, squirting out my attention and my thoughts, really like abusing and soiling the toilet . . . DM: Quite . . . JSM: She now realizes that her father “fired her.” For as long as her father was alive, the president of her office, who was a close friend of her father, would never have the courage to fire her. But now that her father “fired her” by having died without her permission, being no longer there, she really seems to discover that her mother was more important for him than herself. So, there it is a colic, in panic, and somehow in a desperate move to retrieve her position . . . C: Like Aldous Huxley’s book, Time Must Have a Stop . . . DM: Of course, that’s . . . (silence) . . . that’s the punishment, you see . . . (silence) . . . the punishment of Prometheus is intended to be eternal, and hell is intended to be eternal . . . Stop the clock! JSM: “I had many dreams, recalled them all in the morning, but now I cannot remember them any more . . .” DM: Breaking your heart, you see. JSM: Yes, yes . . . Again and again, and again, yes; soiling the toilet out of revenge . . . Well, but is it not also a form of stinging my voyeurism, imagining me to joining her in this sado-masochistic relationship with her?

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DM: Well, it’s a form of torture, it’s like holding a tit-bit for a dog but giving it to him . . . “sit up and beg!” . . . JSM: “All I can recall is that, during the week-end, I dreamed that I had gone to England with two men.” DM: Daddy’s two testicles, you see . . . JSM: “They both are, in fact, close friends of mine. In the dream, we went to a hotel but the room where the three of us were going to stay had the ceiling so low that we couldn’t come out of it . . .” DM: Right, ok . . . JSM: Why do you say “ok”? . . . DM: Well, it’s a costume. JSM: In the claustrum . . . DM: Yes . . . this is all happening inside mother. JSM: . . . back to projective identification, feeling claustrophobic, yes. – “I was so anxious that I had to wake up.” She now felt very pleased for she was now able, at long last, to buy Charlotte a new chest for her room. The old one had been Charlotte’s since she was four. She’s also about to buy herself new shelves that she has needed for years but had so far been unable to do it. This is part of her being able to refurbish and reorganize her own house, something which has often been mentioned by her for years but until now she has not been able to do. She’s now also learning what it means for her to spend money, “what I can spend and what I cannot . . . what my economic level really is. . . .” She has resumed smoking and I wonder whether she is now back again into mother’s anus. Although it’s rare now, I still can hear in her voice the old terribly threatening arrogant undertone. DM: Yes . . . means that you mustn’t challenge her smoking . . . You better wait until you have evidence upon which to interpret, and not to guess about it. The way it looks at this moment, it looks as if smoking is something that she does in the process of going to England with these two men, and ending up in this very narrow place from which she couldn’t come out of . . . So it probably means sucking daddy’s penis, but you haven’t the evidence for it at this point. JSM: Once again she couldn’t recall her dreams. This time, however, she got up, went to her purse, picked up a piece of paper, read to herself a dream she had

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written down on it, laid back on the couch, and said: “Its not interesting . . . I dreamed that I was with Nicola [a good and ‘clean’ friend]. We were on the beach, chatting happily. We then looked down and saw Philipa, another old friend of mine, with several other people. I admire Philipa very much. She had a very complicated life but now she has remarried and has a baby. She’s so well and so happy now . . . it’s so rare nowadays to see anyone well and happy . . . I like her so much.” DM: Right . . . JSM: I wonder what lies within your “right” . . . What do you mean by “right”? DM: Well, when did she have this dream, which she wrote and was in her purse? JSM: In the previous night, Sunday night, I think . . . DM: Are you sure? JSM: No, I’m not sure; this is what I took from her words but I didn’t check it with her. Why do you ask? DM: Yes, well . . . I think that you have to assume that it was, at least, over this weekend . . . JSM: Yes but I don’t have the exact session in my notes, why? . . . DM: Well, we have to wait and see what she’s so happy about . . . JSM: Oh, I see . . . I suddenly thought that she was happy about the refurbishing of her relationship with me, and so rebuilding her hope to have babies from her daddy-analyst, but . . . DM: . . . yes, well I don’t know either who this Philipa is in her dream, who is down the beach, and so happy, and have the baby, and so on . . . I don’t believe in this manic happiness, really. JSM: Ok . . . She went on: – “I had a nightmare but cannot recall it. I kept gnawing my nails the whole day.” – and she added that she was furious with me but . . . DM: . . . yes . . . yes, you see. JSM: “Now when I look at Charlotte doing her home-work I feel so ashamed for what I made of my time and of myself in her age . . . I was never serious about

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my studies . . . I was too occupied with those ‘dreams’ of ruling the world. . . .” At this point the material seems to have suddenly shifted toward her discovery of her drive to rule everyone, I think. DM: Yes . . . JSM: “I feel so ashamed when I realize what I have done with my adolescence, of the time I wasted . . . but no one contained me, you know . . .” – “Yes, you seem to have done all you could not to be contained; you managed to jeopardize everyone just as you have certainly and forcefully done with me for years and still continue to do.” – “That’s quite true . . . I fought all my life not to be contained; not to be stopped.” She is now back to her former routine of arriving late to her sessions, resuming my punishment for having felt pleased with her relationship with Jeremy, and therefore, for my having rebuked her absolute determination to have babies with daddy-analyst. And yet, she’s suddenly quite in time for her session. As she was just going out of my apartment she thanked me quite spontaneously without mentioning any concrete motive for thanking me. She’s now unusually attentive to my way of listening to her and seriously thinking about everything she tells me, sometimes asking me: “are you listening to me?” – as if she was now treading along a new path of communication and beginning to rely upon her relationship with me rather than upon the all-assumed omnipotent relationship with her all-mighty father. DM: Quite . . . JSM: . . . as if she begins to accept that her father is “no more than” her father, really bringing the change into the transference, considering things more closely ... DM: Well, let’s hope so . . . it’s a possibility . . . JSM: She still feels under the old compulsion to study with her daughter, helping her with her home-work. “Now it’s precious for me to study with her . . . it has a therapeutic effect . . . I have never allowed anyone to study with me, least of all my mother, as you know.” She then asked: “May I send you patients? . . . I would like you to have many patients . . .” – she said, in a kind, sincere tone of voice, I felt. At this point her voice became more musical and nice. DM: Hum . . . hum . . . JSM: May I ask you what exactly lives within your highly suspicious “hum . . . hum”? Babies? . . . DM: I am suspicious, yes.

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JSM: About what? DM: As you said, about her presenting you with babies . . . to produce babies for you. Well, we have to wait for the evidence. JSM: “I had two terrible dreams . . . In the first I was in a prison, in Brazil, with Elisa [her close friend who is also a friend of mine and who had sent her to me] and other people.” Some months ago she dreamed that she had seen Elisa with her husband in Brazil and thought [sincerely, so it sounded to me]: “What a beautiful husband she has . . . In the second dream I was in a marvelous palace in Argentina . . . all in green marble. The palace, however, was also a prison . . . I was there imprisoned and yet so excited . . . I had to stay hidden . . . no one could see me there. The next day, however, I felt terrible! There was a turmoil of dreams I can’t recall . . . a woman painted her hair in black [she is intensely blonde]. But then she had to go on painting it every day because of the patches of black hair that were constantly showing up . . .” DM: Right. JSM: She is deceiving me . . . DM: Well, we’re about to discover something about black men; how beautiful they are . . . JSM: “Yesterday I saw a film which shook me very much. It was the story of a brilliant lawyer who was fired because he was found to have AIDS . . . some skin patches began to be visible and he could no longer pass unnoticed.” DM: Right, ok. JSM: Do you think that she begins to be suspicious about her father having had many affairs here and there? DM: Maybe so . . . but this is about herself, really . . . and all these brilliant men, with big brains and big testicles . . . but it’s in mummy’s bottom that you get AIDS . . . But, I’m wondering . . . there’s something about Africa, something about black women or black men . . . We’ll hear about it . . . JSM: You have just anticipated a dream. . . . She now came in for her session with an open, resounding “hello!” and began her session saying: “I had two dreams. In the first I was so earnestly involved in building up something . . . I was putting such an effort in it and was so pleased to do it . . . the other dream didn’t interest me at all. Then the telephone rang. I was furious for having interrupted my dream. I went quickly back to bed, in the hope of resuming it, but lost its thread . . .

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Last Friday it was my birthday. John [a very distinguished film director and a highly cultivated man, who has always stayed away from the social and commercial arena associated with “showbiz,” being a friend of hers] invited a few friends for a private viewing of two short films he had been working on. The films were very beautiful . . . They were really very close to painting, particularly to Georges de la Tour. Then he talked to us about his films, his ideas about them, his feelings. He was so interesting . . . he gradually unveiled for us the meaning of the films we had just seen . . . we slowly came to understand them . . . Then I dreamed that I was inside some building with him. There were three old arches inlaid in the walls . . . there were 16th-century green tiles nicely embedded in the walls all around them . . . I was absolutely fascinated . . . In my dream, I was putting such a great effort in getting this building together . . . I wished to show it to John [a former lover] but I was also working on it earnestly for my own satisfaction . . . to build it up, you see?” – she said, as if in earnest to make me understand something she was unable to express clearly enough. “The building I was trying hard to raise, however, had no roof . . . usually these ancient ruins have no roof . . .” – she then added, this time with a note of affliction in her voice. DM: Yes, well, here you are absolutely in the claustrum, but in the grandiose identification with the mother, exhibiting her to this talented, imaginative blah, blah, blah man. All of her orifices – mouth, vagina, rectum . . . JSM: . . . the three arches she’s trying very hard to make sense of in her mind . . . DM: . . . yes . . . she’s really making an effort to seduce him. Now, he is also showing off to her . . . boasting . . . JSM: The films also gradually appeared as a reference to her analysis. DM: Well, you are optimistic . . . She is deeply lost in projective identification, being the mother, engaged with father’s penis, and testicles, offering to make babies for him . . . Right, let’s go on. JSM: Should I have interpreted all this in the transference? DM: Yes, absolutely in the transference. JSM: “I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamed that I was in a modern, well designed house which was built exactly in the same place the house I was born. The house in which I was born is [in fact] in a blind alley. In my dream I heard some screaming terribly outside. There was a figure with the head of a dog and the body of a woman running through the street. The woman, who was the owner of the dog that came suddenly out of a neighboring house now with the body of a woman, started spraying the dog in order to kill it, and eventually she did kill it

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. . . there the dog laid down, on the street, dead. When I was a little girl I used to climb on the roof of a nearby garage and play, on the roof, with a little boy who lived in the house where, in my dream, the dog came out running.” I asked her about the arched house of the previous dream, and she said: “There was something sacred about it . . . it was a monastery, or something very much like it . . .” [and I remembered her former dreams about old gloomy cold churches where corpses laid on coffins . . .] DM: Hum-hum . . . Well, she tells you what the dream is all about . . . It’s a dream that has its reference to playing being a little girl and playing with a little boy . . . There is a kind of combined object, in which the spraying is intended to kill the dog part, but not to kill the woman, to kill the dog part who has been superimposed on this woman . . . It is as if you come upon a couple in intercourse, and you want to kill the man to get him off, to rescue the woman from this bad dog . . . it’s a combined object, in the model of the Minotaur. Queen Pasiphae and the bull producing this baby, the Minotaur who devours virgins. (silence) Now, it’s very interesting the infantile representation of the combined object, human, and animal, a joke that one of my patients says: “Look mummy, the dogs are getting married” . . . JSM: So, this woman with the dog is a combined object, of me, boasting about my films, and so on, being however a dangerous boy for now firing her just like the president of her office and . . . DM: . . . she is the one who is spraying this combined object to get the man off the woman. JSM: And not trying to raise the suspicion that I have become a dog and she has been playing in the roof with me, and . . . DM: No, it’s part of the game . . . What actually happens is that the little boy gets an erection, and the little girl pees on his erection and that’s called having intercourse . . . Good . . . Ok. JSM: There’s something sacred about it . . . again this sacredness, and the monastery ... DM: Well . . . (smiling) . . . sacred . . . they have the sacred corpses of the saint, or a finger of the saint, and so on . . . C: . . . the dead feces . . . DM: Well, this is all on the anal aspect of projective identification in the mummy’s bottom, yes . . .

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JSM: She was furious with me because I have made a baby during her absence and now fired her; now, at last, it’s fully confirmed why I was in such a hurry to send her away . . . DM: . . . hum-hum . . . JSM: . . . to get rid of her in order to enjoy being with my wife without being pestered by her all the time. DM: It isn’t “without being pestered by her.” It means without being tormented with the desire for her . . . I mean, this is all at the infantile level, you see. That you are the daddy who is tormented with desire for your daughters . . . JSM: I see! . . . I’m the one who is tormented . . . – “I dreamed that my mother had a baby, such a wonderful, beautiful baby!” – she said, in a loving, tender tone. “When I first saw him, however, I was taken aback . . . as I got closer, the baby suddenly turned into two babies . . . in fact two fingers . . .” – she then said, this time expressing repulsion at her own image – . . . “. . . two fingers beneath water . . . I tried to drawn them into water! It was awful!” DM: Masturbating in the bath, you see . . . Now, what would be worth interpreting to her is that she cannot be shown mummy’s new baby and still keep her distance . . . JSM: . . . so still struggling with the prospect of seeing mother having another baby after her. DM: Yes . . . Her mother had a baby, such a wonderful baby . . . and she said, in a loving and tender tone: “When I first saw him, however, I was at a distance . . . Then I got closer, and the baby suddenly turned into two fingers up my ass . . .” you see . . . JSM: Oh I see! . . . Yes! But isn’t it also true that she is beginning to allow herself to think of her mother having a beautiful baby? DM: I agree with your hopefulness . . . That’s not the same as agreeing with your optimism . . . C: Is this again the confusion between the baby and the penis, in a very concrete way . . . ? DM: Yes, it has to be a boy-baby, and it has to have a penis . . . She cannot keep her distance. And, of course, she is worried that you cannot keep your distance.

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JSM: This time, I began to feel a strange feeling. I began to feel erotically attracted to her . . . DM: Right! JSM: What do you mean: “Right!”? DM: Yes, I mean, I noticed that, yes . . . JSM: Oh, you noticed it? . . . DM: Yes . . . JSM: How? DM: Well, your voice became more lively, you’re not hating her, that shit-baby, and so on . . . JSM: She is transformed . . . DM: Yes, yes, she is transformed . . . (in an ironic tone) JSM: Are you implying that I was transformed, but she remains the same? DM: Well, little girls can be beautiful, they can be charming, they can be terribly erotic objects . . . We all have trouble in keeping our hands off them . . . (smiling gently) . . . keeping your distance, that’s very important . . . keeping your distance . . . JSM: . . . myself now being the boy up on the roof she happened to play with, having an obvious erotic flavor . . . DM: Quite . . . JSM: She spent the previous night waking up and eating something which she knows has an aggressive effect on her intestines. In the morning she had a terrible diarrhea. I learnt that she is still having aggressive food every day. She is also smoking, meaning, I believe, injuring her mother’s inside in projective identification, I wondered . . . DM: . . . yes, she can’t keep her distance from the beautiful baby, you see . . . she cannot keep out of mummy’s bottom. JSM: . . . yes . . . Still storming into mummy’s tummy, very concretely identified with her own intestines-womb, keep eating aggressive food sending them all

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down the toilet in the form of diarrhea, and flushing them down the drain, yes . . . However, she seems to have stopped her life-long habit of gnawing her nails, to her great relief and enthusiasm. I felt slightly hopeful that this could indicate a more structural decrease of her oral sadism – her stopping attacking her mother’s nipples and breasts as the object of her dependence, as well as foisting on me infinitely tedious sessions, therefore perhaps confirming the decrease of her arrogant, punishing attacks on me, though still attacking her analysis: “Never had I allowed anyone to help me with my homework, least of all my mother!”. DM: Yes, quite (smiling) . . . JSM: May this also show a diminishing of her anal sadistic attacks on mother’s babies-in-her-rectum, just considering allowing them to live there? DM: Yes, yes . . . I think so. JSM: But then you say that she turned her chilling arrogance and over omnipotent punishment into seduction . . . DM: Yes, into playing with a little boy . . . and when he gets an erection she pees on it, and kills it . . . JSM: And here comes the Negro you anticipated . . . For she now dreamed that there was a head of a Negro separated from his body lying on the floor. She then went to a party and found the body of the same Negro lying there. When, some time later, she returned to the place where she has first just come from and saw the head of the Negro still lying there, she vented to a friend of hers in a terribly freezing contempt: “What?!! This head still lying there after all these years – after ten years?! In my dream I was absolutely insensible about the Negro. It was terrible . . .” DM: Right, ok. JSM: Ten years of analysis . . . DM: Oh, ten years of analysis? JSM: Yes. One feels frozen with the weight of her hatred and contempt and her chilling coolness. I suddenly felt disheartened with her . . . it came as a shock . . . and I felt disheartened suddenly realizing that, at the end of the day, she may not be a very interesting person . . . She may have never been touched by the joy of thinking. She’s certainly capable of enjoying life very intensely and this is certainly interesting in her, and her vitality is certainly infectious, but I wonder if this is not all . . .

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DM: . . . she is an interesting person . . . she is imaginative . . . JSM: . . . but she may never have been touched by the joy of thinking . . . DM: That may be so . . . that she doesn’t know the joy of thinking . . . but she is an imaginative girl . . . Don’t get discouraged. JSM: And then something odd is happening at this moment, right here, with me. As I was reading this material to you, I am just realizing that my tone of voice is now suddenly out of tune with yours . . . This never happened before . . . I am of course following you as closely as I can, and yet I am doing it in a suddenly half-dull tone of voice . . . the emotions I have always intensely invested have partly gone. I’m surprised with the change of the tone of my own voice . . . I somehow feel that I’m no longer here . . . and now I’m worried, wondering whether this may ever have happened in some sessions with her . . . something in me sounds as if I had just suddenly disconnected from her, as if I’m speaking to you at a distance . . . it’s happening with me now with you . . . I’m of course following the material, and of course following all you say, and yet I hear my own voice sounding as if through a sort of a filter, sounding as if no longer from the heart. It’s frightening if it has ever happened in any of the sessions with her. DM: Don’t give her up . . . With a patient like this, ten years is just the beginning . . . She has made a lot of progress, really. She is a kind of patient with great facility for popping in and out of projective identification. And when she comes out, she can be effective in the world, and when she goes back in she becomes a dirty child . . . But one of these days, when she comes out, and tolerates the depression that hits her, she will stay out. It’s the constant masturbation . . . in my experience, it’s necessary, really, to make it explicit for her because the patient often won’t mention it . . . or it’s disguised as a sexual activity, or is disguised as chewing your nails, or god knows what, that it’s a constant masturbation that takes her back inside and they have to work their way out; you have to drag them out. It’s very hard work, and it’s very long work, but she is making progress, there is no reason to be discouraged about her, but there is no reason to be euphoric either.

Note 1. In the middle of this chapter there was another inaudible line in the record of the session. I again signaled this very short line by three dots: . . .

CHAPTER 21 “The thing about life in the claustrum is that it is cut off from the beauty of the world”

Summary Further new aspects of the phenomenology of projective identification are now revealed. They however seem to present us with yet more complex aspects of Sophie’s internal world. There seems to be a shift from mostly persecutory to mostly obsessional material, suggesting a “more tyrannical [slant], ruling the space that she lives in, which is [still] her mother’s rectum.” Her being perhaps cut off from the capacity to experience the beauty of the world would now seem to rather somberly hover over her future. Fears that there might be a paranoid nucleus hidden behind the antidiarrheic medicines now emerged. NB: Another two years later.

JSM: She had warned me, long before her father had died, that should he die she would have no reason to go on living. She would lose all her orientation in life. The meaning of her idea of “orientation in life” has been closely examined. DM: What sort of orientation does she mean? JSM: She meant by it, I think, that by losing her father, she would no longer have anyone who would support her “unconditionally,” this word being raised to unfortunate “celebrity” in both her life and the course of her analysis. This one word has always been a golden bolt to her sense of triumph. She would of course lose the source of her delusion of triumph over her mother, and largely over

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everyone else, particularly over women; she would lose the highest reason why she would have had a baby, her goddess baby from a god-daddy; she would also lose the continual confirmation of the phantasy of possessing, “unconditionally,” Zeus’ golden penis inside her, the term “inside her” meaning her concrete experience of enjoying absolute control over her powerful daddy. DM: Yes, yes. JSM: It seems clear that her whole life has largely been hanging on this delusion of . . . DM: . . . yes, ok . . . JSM: . . . totally possessing all of this mighty penis . . . DM: Godlike . . . JSM: It’s frightening to realize, by carefully listening to the music of her voice, how her “losing all her orientation in life” really seems to stand for what the words really prima facie seem to mean. This was no metaphor. She now had many dreams, could recall them quite well Saturday morning, but all she can now remember is her having dreamed of an insignificant dog. In her dream “There was someone saying that the dog has a broken leg. Strangely, however, I couldn’t see any broken leg and in fact the dog walked unhampered . . . should he have had any broken leg he would have fallen down on one side.” She also dreamed that “. . . I was here. It was the end of the last session of my analysis . . . Elisa, your wife and other people – probably your children – were all here too. Your wife brought me your receipt wrapped up in a bit of a newspaper, with lace on it . . . It was a pleasant dream . . . I woke up only at ten o’clock in the morning.” DM: A receipt wrapped up in newspaper . . . a bit of newspaper with lace on it ... JSM: Yes. It reminded me of the gifts that little children at times offer mother or daddy, hastily wrapping them up in the first bit of paper they find . . . DM: . . . yes, yes, a child’s gift, yes . . . The implication is that she has paid you, and this was your receipt for her payment, I suppose . . . JSM: Yes . . . She therefore owes me nothing . . . she settled all her accounts with me. All is now done away with about her obligations towards me. The “insignificant dog” is of course a version of the head of the Negro still lying on the floor already for ten years. But the piece of paper wrapping up my receipt

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also seems to carry yet another implication, I thought, that her entire analysis is altogether a silly childish play . . . it’s nothing serious . . . it has never been. DM: Yes, yes . . . Well, it’s a pleasant dream, because it means that she had paid you off, she owes you nothing, and she hadn’t done you any harm . . . JSM: No, she just sees my limp penis in the broken leg of the dog . . . it’s nothing; it’s able to walk . . . What would I want his limp penis for? She even puts my wife handing her the receipt as yet another . . . DM: . . . yes, yes . . . just like a secretary . . . JSM: Yes, her capacity for despising everyone, once again . . . DM: Yes . . . Elisa, your wife, your children . . . they’re all insignificant compared to her . . . JSM: . . . having been Elisa who told her to see me . . . she now closes the loop: Elisa, my wife, me, and my children. Farewell to all this nasty silly story of analysis . . . Not even compared with her, I would think: this is now all disposable stuff, all put into the insignificant dog. The next session I was astounded with the sudden spurt of hatred and arrogance she once again launched at David. This lasted for about half an hour. I listened to her in silence, without interrupting her. She finally became embarrassed with my silence and drifted away into trifles. – “I feel very abandoned . . . I felt so because of the end of my analysis, isn’t it?” – “First of all because, I think, of the head of the Negro you have decapitated and still remains there after ten years of analysis.” – “What do you mean?” – “I mean your father’s fecal penis-analyst who betrayed you by sending you away to make more interesting babies without your permission, now confused with David and Florence, the treacherous stool-penis, which you had chopped off and still do not want to restore to life, still remaining there, on the floor.” – “Oh, yes . . . that dream was terrible!” DM: Hum-hum . . . after all these years . . . JSM: Yes . . . DM: Après tout . . . The cry of the masochist . . . After all that I’ve done to you, all I’ve sacrificed for you, you betray me . . . JSM: Her being betrayed by me after having coming for analysis for ten years, and then, all of a sudden, I do this to her . . . I just sent her away . . . ten years saying how I love her, how much I’m interested in her, and now, look what he does to me . . . Now little Sophie knows for sure that I really am far more interested in my new babies . . . This of course was her response to my very careful tentative

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suggestion that she might perhaps think of some date to end her analysis after two full years of rigmarole-sessions, repeating herself ad nauseam, etc. DM: Quite . . . JSM: It has been traumatic for her. And now, after yet another two years, she of course triumphs over the insignificant dog. DM: Quite. JSM: But then she just darted off into all sorts of deceitful arguments, disagreeing with me for this and that. She really sounded mad in her arrogance, and indeed absolutely unconcerned and unfeeling about others. I felt repulsed by her world and even thought, again, that it would be a relief if she would leave analysis. But finally I was interested in understanding how such an awful inner world and frightening way of not-feeling and of thinking may ever shape, and even take such overwhelming control over anyone’s mind, and what could still be done to perhaps undo it, if anything. DM: Hum-hum . . . you are nonplussed by her . . . JSM: . . . yes . . . and I’m upset about it . . . as if I have hurt myself against some limit . . . and I must work it out . . . DM: . . . her arrogance, and aloofness, and coldness, and after ten years of decapitating you . . . And now, another two years, the insignificant dog. JSM: Yes, and I can certainly hear all her chilling coolness and contempt “singing” in the unbearably sharpened blade of her voice, so utterly unfeeling and so utterly unconcerning, showing a new dimension of being über alles. It’s interesting. . . . She then made some reference to her “intestinal fauna” instead of “flora” and told me that she was again having such an amount of anti-diarrheic pills. DM: . . . (long silence) . . . hum-hum . . . JSM: But I also told her that all I suggested to her was that she might wish to just tentatively consider managing things by herself in a year or two . . . but yes, I was completely lost facing two years of her apparently not moving a single inch. DM: Yes, yes. JSM: I am certainly pleased with her about the many ways in which she did make progress, nevertheless . . . about her own health, about her relationships with her mother, her father, her siblings, her growing concern about Charlotte . . .

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DM: So your impression is that she actually improved her family relationships . . . JSM: Oh yes! No doubt whatever, and with her daughter as well . . . and with her friends . . . DM: So, all of her bad will is collected with you? JSM: Yes . . . But whether or not this may all be suddenly turned on its head, I really never know with Sophie. DM: You were the bête noir . . . JSM: . . . yes, I’m the insignificant dog . . . DM: . . . the headless Negro . . . Ok . . . What did you make of that slip of the tongue? JSM: She is referring to the wild beasts that eat her up in her intestines, which seems to feed her arrogance and her hatred . . . DM: Yes, the insignificant dog in her bowels . . . The animal in her stool . . . JSM: But I didn’t take it as an aggressive . . . DM: . . . oh no, no, it’s a confirmation about your fecal penis as you told her . . . the insignificant dog . . . There is daddy, and then there is you . . . the dog and the Negro in her rectum, yes. JSM: She had to diarrhea these terrible animals out of her body. And there was a long story about her “submission,” so she puts it: “I submitted to all your rules in my analysis.” DM: . . . (long silence) . . . She still takes these diarrhea pills? JSM: Yes . . . while at the same time still occasionally taking in things she knows for sure would induce colic and diarrhea, thus enraging her “fauna” out of her body, spraying the head of the dog away from her rectum. DM: Well, she lives in projective identification with her mother right now . . . and is there receiving father’s good penis . . . but she is constantly being persecuted by the feces in mummy’s rectum . . . the bad penis . . . the insignificant dog, the headless Negro . . . JSM: The next session she said that she woke up in great anxiety from a dream in which she was struggling to have her table set for a [special, peaceful] dinner

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but just couldn’t get along with it. At this particular point of her dream, however, something began to change, I would think. For in her dream, she had just one or two hours left to get the table ready, and thought that she was not going to succeed having it ready in time. Nancy – a former friend who had been an idol of her adolescence for having fired back all her own parents’ advice and indeed everyone’s advice (“the bad Nancy,” as she now calls her) – was there too, in her dream, hindering all Sophie’s efforts to get the table properly set. In her dream, she thought: “I have to rush.” Her thought was however couched into a cooperative tone of voice, it sounded to me. So I took it as a realization that, in spite of her real wish to give a nice, peaceful dinner, integrating the “bad Nancy-Sophie” having her at the table, she still had much work to do in her analysis before living, before being ousted from analysis, otherwise she risks my ending her analysis prematurely, and indeed to be ousted by me, finally dead sick of her, and she would have no time to “get the table properly and peacefully set” . . . The Nancy side of Sophie – the Sophie living in projective identification, the unbearably arrogant Sophie who “had never study with anyone least of all my mother,” is hindering her plans for this nice dinner, however. The next session she told me that once again she took coffee in the morning, in fast, and once again got what she uses to describe as “a colic,” which actually means a colic followed by diarrhea. She usually describes it in these terms: “I undid myself in diarrhea.” DM: Yes . . . that’s what she feels, really . . . This insignificant dog in her bottom is ruling her life . . . yes . . . (silence) . . . her nightmare is constipation. JSM: I suggested that what, in her, spoilt her breakfast – spoiling her analystmother’s breast, in hatred because of the night she had just spent with her father – that side of her seems to be the same which remembers her dreams in the morning but then forgets them all. – “This also seems to me the same part of you who forcefully diarrheas your dreams down the drain.” – . . . “. . . that’s, I think, because I told my enterologist to talk to you . . . [about the pills she takes to stop her diarrhea]” – she said. DM: Hum-hum . . . (long silence) . . . Well, she’s controlling everything and everyone . . . tyrannizing you, tyrannizing her doctor . . . She’s in terror of constipation . . . she has to get rid of this insignificant dog . . . She is in terror of constipation, of having this terrible animal inside her . . . (silence) . . . JSM: She seems in terror of not being in time to have the table properly settled before leaving analysis. DM: Yes . . . of being eaten up . . . It is extraordinary how terrified these children can be of having these fecal-penises inside them . . . It combines all the terrors of the bad animals, the tapeworms . . . everything eating them up inside . . . these bad animals of nightmares when children wake up in screaming the bad animals

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that are coming for them; mummy has to leave the light on, has to lie down on the bed with them, has to hold on to them . . . eaten up, you see. JSM: My feeling is that every time she takes a full cup of pure strong coffee in fast, knowing how aggressively she used to respond to it, this is a sado-masochistic movement given concrete form to yet another burst of fury directed against the animals inside her to “fire” them from her intestines like she had been fired by her president, and of course, the head of the Negro out and separated from his body for having also been fired from her analysis . . . DM: Yes . . . yes . . . all the animals eating her up . . . JSM: The next session she once again said: “I had some dreams but now I cannot recall them.” I suggested that this seems to stand for the medicines she keeps feeling in need of, a hostile interruption of her thinking, that is, a fierce assault on what best links us both after my having “sent her away,” you insignificant dog who no longer deserves to have my dreams, to enjoy my dream-babies anymore. I also learnt that in all her medical examinations her intestines were always in an uproar: spasmodic moves and knobs. And yet, surprisingly she has just dropped one of the many drugs she has been taking for years. She however told me this as a quite ordinary fact, as if it has nothing been talked over and over again, that she’s now drinking wine every day at lunch time, and possibly also at dinner, without the slightest upset [her “absolutely incapable of” having any wine had always been a source of pain for her]. DM: She is secretive . . . secretive . . . JSM: From now on a change in her attention to her health was quite visible. The material in the sessions changed as well. I had the feeling that an important “secret,” undermining her analysis and her progress for years, has now begun to be brought to light. DM: yEEEsssss! (ironical) . . . JSM: What your lovely “yEEEssss!” may possibly mean, may I ask? DM: Yes . . . That your rival, her enterologist, she is beginning to turn against him, and is beginning to respect you because you don’t stick your finger in her bottom. JSM: “It’s absolutely impossible for me not to take these medicines.” – “Which I hear as if you were in fact saying to me: ‘it’s absolutely impossible for me, little Sophie, once you put me out, not to hate my mother-analyst and relinquish the palace, all in marvelous green marbles, in Argentina, inside which I am secretively

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living all alone with daddy who loves me unconditionally(!!!) – do you hear me: unconditionally!?!?!?’ – this lovely palace which is such an exciting prison, in such a squalid place, where I live hidden and alone with my daddy-penis inside my anus, who protects me from the insignificant dog of my analyst who sent me away to flee to Brazil with Elisa, so I have to be absolutely secretive about it. I absolutely need these pills which seem a black-screen for this great secret: when you see ‘my’ Elisa in Brazil with a beautiful man, you seem to secretly flee to Argentina’s ‘marvelous’ palace all alone with daddy, hiding behind these secretive pills.” – “I don’t want anyone to see me here [sic – ‘here’ not there], I am alone with my father.” . . . – “. . . yes, in a quagmire of dirt and cruelty in Argentina, and yet marveled with such a palace provided you are secretively alone with daddy. . . .” The following session she dreamed that she had killed a woman but gave no details about her dream. David’s mother died. She has always been important for Sophie, for “she has always had strict hours and never allowed me to step upon her hours.” Sophie had always remained in friendly relations with her. Last Saturday she dreamed that she was in the house of David’s mother and was talking with his sister. Sophie feels infuriated with her because, now that their mother had died, David’s sister wants to take full control of everything in the family. “She’s silly and wicked and I dislike her acutely. In my dream I was trying to show her that I was not like her. I also dreamed of another friend of hers, a very talented woman, who however has spoiled all her talents so pitifully that she is no longer capable of earning her living because of suffering from chronic depression.” DM: Right . . . It’s all in controlling her rectum, which is controlling everything in the world, because it is her world – mother’s rectum – and, in controlling mother’s rectum, she controls the world and she controls father’s penis. Every time he comes in there, it is at her control . . . JSM: The next session she came in quite a “making-a-fuss-mood,” voiced off all kind of insults against David, and tried by all her means to entice me into an argument. – “Last Monday I dreamed that you have just put an end to my treatment, that you were absolutely fed up with me and sent me to a colleague of yours. His consulting-room was just beneath your floor. You took me to him. The new analyst was just a bold, dirty analyst. There were more people there . . . I felt awful the whole Tuesday as if I was really ill. Last night I dreamed that I was weaving a very large quilt. I was sitting, weaving it very, very patiently, just taking my time while I kept weaving it.” Then she told me how close she now is to her mother, how deeply dependent upon her she now feels, and how patient her mother has always been with her. Her “discovery” of her mother – of how important she has always been in her life; how privileged she feels in having had such a mother; how much more important than her father her mother has been for her, has now begun to take a far firmer place in both her life and her analysis. Her being increasingly driven to her mother has really made quite a very long way

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in her analysis from her former “full-time-fury-and-shoutings” with her. She again went back to this past time. “My mother used to say that I would never find anyone who would ever stand me; that one day no one would bear me anymore.” DM: Right . . . and that is your virtue . . . you are the only person in the world that seems to be able to stand her. And she is in mortal dread of you kicking her out . . . JSM: Yes . . . it’s perhaps not so much her arch-arrogance and contempt being hurt by my “sending her away” but perhaps her realizing that this might happen . . . She was anxious to tell me a terrible dream she had as soon as she left for holidays. She actually left for holidays a few days before my own holidays. She studied in a very good, reassuring school for many years. This school seems to have played a highly protective, containing, motherly function for her. In her dream, however, the entire school was crumbling down and everybody inside it, including herself, had got AIDS. She spent the entire holidays with her mother and Charlotte . . . DM: . . . ruling everybody . . . JSM: . . . cooking for the three of them, seeing no one else, calling no one, rather taking care of the domestic work herself. DM: Right . . . JSM: . . . perhaps trying to anchor herself, I would wish to believe, outside the palace in Argentina, in a more humane place. And yet, something disquieted me during this session. I was strangely unable to gather any meaningful material and couldn’t understand what was going on. I felt myself unable to form more than a piecemeal view of the material and felt indistinctly lost amidst it. Furthermore, it seemed to me that there was a slightly queer tone in her voice. The next session she both looks and sounds different. Her tone of voice had now changed into a sweeter key. She wrote down many of her dreams and enjoyed reading them for me, one after the other, sounding like a little child enjoying showing her drawings and first writings at school to daddy and expecting him to tell her what they might mean. The next morning, however, she had a terrible diarrhea. – “I spent the whole morning in the toilet . . . I couldn’t stop it in spite of the three medicines I had, and could not recall any of the dreams of the previous night . . . this has not been happening for a long time now. When I arrived from holidays I felt so quiet, I thought I would have all the time in the world, I was not anxious, not upset. Then I was finally able to put my books in order on my new shelves, at very long last! . . . all arrranged in alphabetical order . . . it’s so important for me to be able to do this.” She has indeed struggled for years with her inability to put her books and her papers in order though suffering for being unable to do it. – “The central

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part of it is already finished; only the lower part remains untidy. Then I came upon a full directory of the school (with photos of each class, year after year, and so on), and sat myself down looking at it quietly and in such delight . . . I must have been doing some important work during the holidays . . . something like bringing unity inside me.” I again felt disquieted about all this. Of course, I told her about the “untidy low part,” the medicines, and the diarrhea, but still felt unquiet about all this sudden “order” . . . as well as about her quietness . . . DM: . . . (long silence) . . . She has been overpowered by her obsessionality now . . . yes . . . (silence) . . . needing to rule everything and everybody in the space which she occupies, which is a terrible space . . . it’s always dirty . . . she gets these compulsive cleanings . . . she has to clean, clean, clean . . . and it never gets clean. Ok . . . her irritable bowel. JSM: Now I learnt that she has been in an active process of precocious menopause already for about three years. I had never heard a word about this before. I asked her what is her gynecologist’s view about it. Her doctor was at first astonished and has been desperately struggling not to allow her to lose out on the protective hormonal shield inherent in fertility. Sophie, however, clearly tended to disparage her upsetting condition, insisting that “it’s quite normal,” sounding quite unstirred by it. I suggested that she seems to have decided to just remain with her father in the golden grave, renouncing fertility now that he is dead, renouncing sexuality, and even, gradually, life itself. – “It’s true that I’m giving up something; I have noticed that I am no longer interested in life; everything is a disappointment to me; there is nothing in life that interests me anymore” – she said, showing, in the music of her voice, however, not a single note of concern or disquiet. As I said above, several years ago she warned me that, should her father die, she would lose all her orientation in life. So I again suggested that “You seem to be determined to accomplish your old promise about your father’s death. Little Sophie-of-thepalace-prison in Argentina seems to have again lost all your “orientation in life,” as you told me you would if only your father dies; so little-Sophie now seems determined to remain there, imprisoned, shut up within a splendid green marbled grave, even excited to remain there forever, your back definitely turned to the boring world, to the insignificant dog whom you think has fired you out of analysis, now remaining in the palace, secluded, in complete secret, without being seen by anyone, alone with daddy, and yet surrounded by dirt and corruption and political persecution and misery. “You seem to be clutching your hands and teeth in a final whim.” – “But people do not interest me . . .” – and I insisted on that the only thing that can possibly interest little-Sophie-of-the-palace is to remain Cleopatra-together-with-Zeus-in-secret, even if only in this shining grave. She would then correct me saying, then back to her usual glamorous voice: “Cleopatra domineering Zeus . . .” – but then laughing gently about it. The next session she told me a dream which she described as a terrible nightmare: she dreamed that David and Florence were together – just together,

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not necessarily involved in any sexual relationship, suggesting, I think, that she may perhaps begin to conceive the possibility that two people may indeed love each other without it necessarily implying being all the time making baby after baby – being together with one another as a key side of a mature love relationship. She was so shaken by this image that she felt ill and stayed prostrated for the whole week-end, as if suddenly realizing that her parents did love each other for so many years, and that she may have never understood it, and she has also never understood this about herself, in her own life, having, therefore, lost this experience, the meaning of loving a man. She told me that it was this summer that her fertility has suddenly stopped. – “I even felt some satisfaction in realizing it,” – she now added – “I told my mother about it, feeling even pleased, though I usually do not speak with her about my gynaecological problems.” I suggested that she seemed to mean, saying to her mother: “ ‘Now I’m definitely with him; I joined daddy at last!; I won! I am the true widow, you see’. What a triumph! My precocious menopause is my final triumph! Now, forever with him alone and in secret in the marvelous palace in Argentina.” I also suggested that this seems to be a real nightmare though lived alone through her body, but she really does not seem to experience it as a nightmare at all. Again, she really seemed shattered by having intuited that Florence and David could really love each other without this necessarily mean making baby after baby after baby, and that perhaps I too may go to holidays not necessarily to exclude her from my concern and very strong commitment to work with her as best as I could, being mad to make baby after baby with my wife, crashing the super-hyper-Cleopatra down to the pitiful condition of a despicable worm. Her “Nothing interests me anymore in the world,” seems very closely linked to my cancellation of sessions, as well as leaving her behind for holidays, and even worse, to throwing her out of analysis. “Last night I dreamed that a gentleman, much older than me, came into my room, in a hotel, and handed me a book. Then I left the hotel coming back later. When I came back, however, the whole floor of the hotel of my room was in flames, as well as the entire upper floor. The firemen were struggling to extinguish the fire and a lot of people had gathered around the hotel in disarray. As I approached the hotel and saw all that turmoil, I jumped into the first taxi which passed by and fled. While driving, the driver looked back, gazing at the book I was carrying with me, looking at me with quite accusatory eyes but said nothing.” She fully agreed with my suggestions that her dream seemed about daddy’s penis she had wrenched from her mother and darted off, hanging on to “the precious book” which she knows to be her mother’s – the precious book her father had offered her mother their whole life, his love, his tenderness, his attention, his care, his concern, his joy, which, however, she just once again took just for his penis, as the taxi-driver-analyst’s eyes showed her . . . – “So you steal daddy’s golden penis from her, and now that I have thrown you off analysis you set Rome in flames just like Nero. You turn the rest of the world into hell and flee with his penis.” And yet, as far as I can see, many things now seem to have changed. She now recovered her cycles . . . she indeed seems to have recovered many things . . .

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DM: (silence) This dream is about her cruelty . . . (long silence) . . . She seems to me to be far less hypochondriacal at the moment, and more obsessional, and tyrannical, and ruling the space that she lives in, which is her mother’s rectum. JSM: Setting Rome on fire . . . DM: Quite . . . And you are the insignificant dog-penis . . . she says that she doesn’t owe you anything, she has paid you, she didn’t break your leg, she hasn’t broken your heart . . . thank god! . . . She is a powerful bully . . . JSM: Aren’t you worried about this fortunately only momentary losing her normal periods? DM: No, no . . . JSM: Oh no? Her doctor was said to be desperate about it. And I did feel her doctor desperate, prescribing this and that and wishing to be minutely told about the evolution of this “assault” on her fertility. But she now has recovered it completely . . . but you aren’t worried about it all the same? DM: Well, she is somebody who has squandered her sexuality . . . it’s not surprising if she has a premature menopause . . . She hasn’t had much real sexual life . . . It has all been masturbation . . . She has been twelve years with you now? JSM: Yes . . . DM: Well, her life is still hanging by a thread, and that thread is you . . . And of course you don’t dare to kick her out because you’d be kicking her into the grave . . . What she says about her father is also really that she feels that analysis enables her to stay alive, because she has lost all her interest in ruling everybody and ruling everything and tyrannizing over everyone . . . It doesn’t really interest her anymore, it doesn’t excite her, doesn’t thrill her anymore . . . Even beating up David doesn’t thrill her anymore. JSM: She actually stopped crushing David with her shoutings and her endless contempt, yes . . . DM: Well, she is consumed with jealousy of his new wife . . . (silence) . . . She is realizing, more and more, what a fool she is, and how she has wasted, not just life, but talents. JSM: Yes . . . she now says to me, quite clearly, “what a stupid life I have been living . . .”

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DM: Yes . . . she has nothing to show for it . . . all built around the delusion of controlling and possessing father’s penis . . . JSM: Now, she has been telling me stories suggesting how her father, though no matter how lovingly, seems to have inflamed her incestuous phantasies . . . DM: Well, don’t believe it . . . It’s all her phantasy of controlling his penis. She is still pretty mad. But she is occasionally trying to stick her head out of the claustrum, and she is appalled of what she sees . . . the waste of her life, the waste of her talents . . .

JSM: Do you understand why it seems so impossible to dismantle the delusional system . . . why it seems so unreachable? . . . DM: Because you can’t really get in contact with it . . . JSM: Yes, but why? DM: . . . it’s allocated out in space . . . JSM: What does that exactly mean, can you say? What does it exactly mean, allocated out in space? You have such an extensive experience in dealing with schizophrenia, with the delusional system . . . DM: . . . I’ve had uniform lack of success . . . JSM: So you may be in quite a privileged position to say why it is unreachable . . . out of reason, out of the possibility of thinking . . . What exactly? C: When you say “out in space,” do you mean that it is out of the space of human relation? Out of what is human? DM: Well . . . the space is full of radio waves, television waves, and so on . . . is full of music, is full of drama . . . but you have to have these special technological instruments to receive them, you can’t just stick your head up . . . you can’t just listen to the music of the spheres . . . you have to have an instrument that receives them. Well, you don’t have an instrument for receiving delusions . . . you just hear them. JSM: And yet you can understand, in what you hear, that there is something you can recognize as a delusional system and you can give it a name. DM: Yes . . . and you recognize that you can’t make any contact with it. If you had a delusional television machine, you could get a picture of it. But then you wouldn’t know it, you would only know about it . . . it’s not of this world.

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C: But why are human beings capable of creating a world which is not of this world, which is not human? DM: Well, you see representations of it in borderline psychotic people, always in danger of becoming psychotic. Their becoming psychotic is represented in various ways, either in something like going into a trap door, or floating away into space. The laws of gravity are suspended, and you are no longer attracted to stay on earth . . . you just float away . . . (silence) Now, the question of why does it happen to people is just the wrong question . . . It just does happen that people are attracted to the idea of floating away into space . . . it does tremendously attract them . . . (silence) . . . What seems to attract them is to be alone . . . without feeling any loneliness, without feeling bereft of other relationships . . . just the luxury of being by yourself . . . in no pain . . . and, of course, wishing for death. To cease upon the midnight without pain . . .1 In ordinary life, we are acutely aware of the pain of dying, and the reluctance to die . . . What we’re not aware of is the desire to die . . . which you see in very old people, who feel terribly frustrated that they cannot die, and are always saying: “I want to die, don’t keep me alive, don’t force me to stay alive.” They seem to yearn for something that you might call “the peace and quiet of the grave.” (silence) . . . But none, I think, do there embrace . . .2 once you have lost the desire to embrace anybody else, the grave looks absolutely delicious, delightful . . . Such a quiet place. But none, I think, do there embrace . . . The thing about life in the claustrum is that it is cut off from the beauty of the world. There is nothing interesting that can be seen from there, the only thing that can be interesting is to look out the mother’s eyes and think that you know everything. JSM: “The Delusion of Clarity of Insight” . . .3 DM: That’s right . . . yes . . . it’s terrible, really. C: I have been reading and discussing The Claustrum with two colleagues, and found very difficult to understand the concept of “negative capability.” DM: It’s the pleasure of not knowing . . . JSM: It’s rejoicing in uncertainty, of treasuring the experience of doubt and uncertainty and in mystery . . . DM: Now, what everybody forgets about negative capability is the pleasure of mystery. JSM: Not everybody. A mathematician – Ulman – says something like the most beautiful thing in the world is the mystery . . . what is mysterious, and that it is the mystery of things that throws both artists and scientists into research; the fascination with what is mysterious.4 But Einstein, Poincaré, so many other people – painters, poets . . . – have celebrated, in so many different ways, the mystery of

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things, expressing their marveling about it in so many ways . . . They live among the mystery of things, I believe. This is a word that has yet no place in the consulting-rooms and it’s tragic, I would believe. It’s still a forbidden word in psychoanalysis. DM: Why everybody hates mathematics . . . it’s always “because, because, because” . . . (all laughing) JSM: Dr. Meltzer doesn’t really understand a thing about mathematics . . . (all laughing). Mathematics is not about knowing everything, not even about knowing anything; and it’s certainly not about becauses. It’s teeming with mysteries . . . it’s mysterious from A to Z . . . DM: Right. But the way it is taught is terrible . . . JSM: Ah! It is, yes . . . DM: . . . but the differential and integral calculus is beautiful . . . JSM: . . . every theorem . . . I mean . . . the very fact that you have a theorem, which just brings together, in no more than a line or two, so many complicated thoughts and insights and both failed and well succeeded attempts to see beyond the edge, is in itself a marvel . . . something like Poincaré’s “selected fact,” and indeed Bion’s “selected fact” . . . there are hundreds of years of thought and feeling and history behind any important theorem. DM: Of course . . . JSM: . . . and then, quite suddenly, all this just emerges as a vision; just like that, all in a sudden . . . like a key stroke a painter happens to see it was missing on his canvas and then, all in a sudden, that particular stroke transforms it into a marvelous painting . . . just like a marvelous musical phrase . . . like a marvelous idea . . . mathematics is full of mysteries; it’s not a heap of becauses . . . DM: . . . yes . . . Ok! Now, you still have quite a hard work with Sophie. She’s a very difficult girl, but certainly made progress.

NB: The next clinical report – the largest I ever brought to Meltzer – could no longer be examined by him. The treasure of having had his assistance in closely following the analysis of Sophie had now to meet its end.

Being cut off from the beauty of the world 259

Sophie continued her analysis for many years. Her analysis has still gone through particularly upsetting crises, including many pre-hallucinatory moments, dangerously nearing, I would think, Meltzer’s description in his insightful paper “The Role of the Claustrum in the onset of Schizophrenia” (Meltzer, 1991, 1992, pp. 117–126). However, Sophie showed the extraordinary talent to carefully shield, and keep alive inside her, unharmed, her profound passion and fascination for her mother which, together with her profound gratitude for her mother, gradually took up the stage. Sophie succeeded in maturing her fascination and passion for her mother by gradually “anchoring it in goodness” [cf. the end of Chapter 8], and discovering her mother as an object of ravishing beauty. These feelings for her mother gradually branched out into the form of aesthetic experiences and research which slowly invaded the concreteness of her days, and were eventually allowed to guide her life. Her fascination for the analytical process as well as for Freud’s genius became paramount. As Meltzer had guessed as early as in the first supervision session, Sophie “was probably gifted in ways that she has never made any great use of” [cf. the end of Chapter 1]. Eventually, these deeply rooted feelings for her mother allowed her still unknown talents to begin to flourish. As if wisely learning to wait for a time in which she would grow her many both known and unknown qualities into her life and the lives of many, she showed the passion, the strength and the courage to allow this time to gradually mature in her life and to carefully escort her qualities, shielding them all through these many difficult years into the bright light of her extraordinary vitality and capacity for joy.

Notes 1. Cf. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” 2. Andrew Marvell, from “To His Coy Mistress.” 3. Meltzer, D. (1976). “The Delusion of the Clarity of Insight” Int J Psycho-Anal 57, 141–146. 4. cf. Ulman, 1976.

APPENDIX Donald Meltzer’s claustrum theory – a brief survey

Melanie Klein’s first description of the mechanisms of projective identification (1946) lent metapsychological and clinical meaning to both the idea of the external mother’s boundaries and the phantasy of violating them. Decades of clinical research into the phenomenology of projective identification eventually branched out into two fundamentally distinct areas of research: the phenomenology of projection, and the phenomenology of identification. The Kleinians concentrated most of their research efforts on the latter. Meltzer was the first and, to the best of my knowledge, so far the only, to have extensively investigated the former. Meltzer coined the term and first established the concept of the internal world of the internal mother. In Klein’s original description of projective identification the external mother was the object of projection. The drama launched by the phantasy of projective identification, in the Kleinians’ conception, was believed to unfold on the stage of the external mother’s inside. Both the Kleinians and post-Kleinians seem to still share this view today. Clinical findings have however showed Meltzer that, although the object of projection remains, as before, the external mother, the drama associated with it ultimately unfolds, at the level of psychic reality, in the internal mother’s inside. The fundamental clinical finding which first put him on this new track was a hitherto unobserved oddity in the mode of operation of some forms of splitting and idealization (cf. 1966, pp. 335–336; repr. 1992, pp. 15–16). I cannot possibly discuss this clinical finding here but it proved crucial in paving the way to another key discovery of Meltzer’s. Mostly inspired by the work of the autism group which he himself founded and closely supervised for fifteen years (cf. Meltzer et al., 1975), and particularly by Weddell’s clinical work with Barry (1975), Meltzer gradually realized that projection seemed in itself to generate a hitherto unsuspected topography in the internal mother. Any part of the self, just by having intruded into the external mother, is now believed to create a space inside the internal mother which the part of the self now very concretely experiences to be living in.

Appendix 261

This space is called the claustrum. Many years of clinical observation have eventually shown Meltzer that the so-called portal of entrance into the external mother’s body – eyes/ears; vagina; anus – through which the intrusive parts of the personality gets into the external mother in unconscious phantasy, therefore violating her boundaries, no longer generates three different spaces inside the internal mother, as he first believed, but in fact three highly complex worlds. Each of these worlds is defined by its place in the topography the internal mother’s inside is now very concretely experienced to be divided into, together with a group of values, principles, ways of thinking, views of the world and aims in life. These qualities define each of these worlds. We may then perhaps hint at the extreme complexity of the claustrum and the intricacy of its clinical phenomenology as it concretely emerges every day in the clinical hour. These different worlds map out the internal mother as it is reshaped by intrusion (projection) into the external mother. Different parts of the self living inside different worlds inside the internal mother feel, perceive, judge, think and therefore respond differently to the same phenomena in both the internal and the external reality. This diversity of phenomena leave their readable imprints on the analysand’s dreams, the history of transference, the history of counter-transference as this book repeatedly and vividly shows, the qualities of his thought and of his language, his views of the world, his values, his aims in life, and of course, on his behaviour. The concrete dynamic and the clinical meaning of all these fundamental aspects of the phenomenology of intrusion (projection) may be closely examined in this book. What appears to be most central in Meltzer’s claustrum theory may also be observed in this book in detail: the internal functions of the internal mother, so crucial in structuring virtually all the qualities of the personality, may therefore be altered, in countless many different degrees of disturbance, translated into as many different clinical phenomena, by the qualities of these different worlds consequent to projection. The reading of these changes is largely the reading of the phenomenology of projection, that is, of claustrophobia, in the whole new sense Meltzer gave the term. Meltzer’s view of claustrophobia is crucially linked to his notion of life-in-the-claustrum. Quite a number of phenomena which have so far been lumped together under the large conciliatory umbrella of “current social phenomena” thus elapsing through the nests of the known pathology, may now be shown to be part of the life-in-the-claustrum, and therefore, as concrete aspects of the phenomenology of projection. The Claustrum Theory brings a host of as yet unrecognized clinical and metapsychological problems to the forefront of our perplexity. Of all these many I will now briefly point to two particularly puzzling ones: how is it that, by “merely” modifying the qualities of the internal mother purely by the strength of an unconscious phantasy – that of projection into the external mother – one may see the qualities of his own thinking deeply modified, and in particular, deeply degraded? These modifications strictly accord with the particular qualities of the world-inside-mother the projected parts of the personality are now concretely

262 Appendix

experiencing living in. The other puzzling problem that Meltzer’s theory brings to our perplexity and demanding new directions of research is how is it that the parts of the personality living in the claustrum lose not only all access to the experience of beauty but even to the awareness of such serious deprivation? (cf. last chapter of this book). Although Donald Meltzer’s claustrum theory still remains today altogether virtually unknown, this theory is believed to add a key new page to our understanding of the phenomenology of projective identification. The light Meltzer’s theory sheds on the host of new clinical and technical problems that the analyst is constantly asked to respond to in the concreteness of the everyday consultingroom is just invaluable. The role that the qualities of the internal mother are now shown to play, in the light of Meltzer’s claustrum theory, in both structuring and destructuring the human mind, was a major discovery and became a source of new fundamental insights into both the nature and the workings of the human mind. Meltzer’s claustrum theory is believed to add a new page to the history of our attempts to understand the human mind.

REFERENCES

Bion, W. (2013). Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision, edited by J. Aguayo and B. Malin. London: Karnac. Keats, J. (1990). Letters of John Keats, edited by R. Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, P. and Steiner, R. (eds) (1991). The Freud–Klein Controversies 1941–1945. London: Tavistock/Routledge. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 3). London: The Hogarth Press. Meltzer, D. (1966). The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 47. Reprinted in E. Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today, Vol. I, , London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 102–116. Reprinted, with an introductory note and comment, in The Claustrum – An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena. Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1992, pp. 13–31. Meltzer, D. (1967). The Psycho-Analytical Process. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Meltzer, D. (1973). Tyranny. In Sexual States of Mind. Perthshire: Clunie Press (original work published 1968). Meltzer, D. (1976). The Delusion of the Clarity of Insight. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 57, 141–146. Meltzer, D. (1979). Sexual States of Mind. Perthshire: Clunie Press (original work published 1973). Meltzer, D. (1984). Dream-Life. A re-examination of the psycho-analytical theory and technique. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Meltzer, D. (1986). Studies in Extended Metapsychology. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Meltzer, D. (1992). The Claustrum: An investigation of claustrophobic phenomena. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Meltzer, D. (1994). Lectures and Seminars in Kleinian Child Psychiatry (in collaboration with Esther Bick). Sincerity and Other Works. London: Karnac Books (original work published 1960). Meltzer, D. (1997). Interview by Marc du Ry. In B. Bourgoyne and M. Sullivan (eds), The Klein–Lacan Dialogues. London: Rebus Press. pp. 177–185.

264 References

Meltzer, D. (1998). I’ve Been Done its Way! (interview given to C. M. Smith). Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 16(2). Reprinted in S. F. Cassese, Introduction to the Work of Donald Meltzer. London: Karnac, Appendix 1. Meltzer, D. (1999). Interview given to Robert and Mirta Oelsner. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 21(3) (2005), 455–461. Meltzer, D. and Williams, M. (1988). The Apprehension of Beauty: The role of aesthetic conflict in development, violence and art. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Meltzer, D., Bremner, J., Hoxter, S., Weddell, D., and Wittenberg, I. (eds) (1975). Explorations in Autism: A psycho-analytical study. Perthshire: Clunie Press. Steiner, J. (2016). Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 85(2). Ulman, S. M. (1976). Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Charles Scribner. Weddell, D. (1975). Disturbed Geography of the Life-Space in Autism – Barry. In D. Meltzer, J. Bremner, S. Hoxter, D. Weddell and I. Wittenberg (eds), Explorations in Autism: A psycho-analytical study. Perthshire: Clunie Press.

INDEX

abandonment 57–58, 154 abortion 129 absolute control 126, 145, 245 abuse/abused 4, 96, 106, 231, 232 acting: in 1, 4, 9–11, 27, 37–39, 82, 84, 86, 89, 217, 226–243; out 1, 8, 10, 44, 51, 77, 78, 117, 120, 149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 170, 231, 233 addiction 165, 172, 219 adolescents 147, 201 adult life xviii, 4, 87, 89 aggression 2, 25, 83, 87, 141, 184, 216, 241, 248, 250 AIDS 17, 22, 139, 163–164, 166, 199, 237, 252 anality 155, 163, 208 anal masturbation 151, 153, 175 analysis 1–26, 27, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 50, 51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 64, 66, 68, 74, 78, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 100, 107, 109, 111, 114, 120–122, 123–125, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 162, 165, 168, 170, 172, 177, 179, 180–187, 202, 215–217, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 238, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258, 259; outside the transference 15–26 analyst 9, 10, 14, 24, 32, 105, 181, 251, 262; daddy-/father- 33, 83, 89, 99, 136, 161, 162, 215, 235, 236; dog- 168; mother-/mummy- 48, 55–57, 68–69, 73, 79, 98, 222, 251

analytical process 259 angel 102, 142–144, 205 anxiety 6–8, 16, 19, 34, 37, 39, 47–48, 73–74, 99, 114–115, 146–147, 166, 173–174, 176, 223–224 anus 32, 34, 145, 151, 153, 184, 185, 188, 208, 222, 223, 224, 233, 234, 251, 261 applause 138, 144 Argentina 237, 251, 253–254 aristocracy 109 arrogance 107, 139, 145, 162, 167, 180–182, 193, 215, 246–248 art-objects 95–98 assault 83, 96, 224, 250, 255 atmosphere: in the consulting room 37; of insurrection 126; in the session 67, 143, 185 attack 85, 86, 88, 97, 145–147, 217, 242; panic 113, 117 autism group 260 babies 27–40, 42–43, 54–55, 57–62, 65–66, 87–90, 115–117, 129–131, 149–151, 154–156, 164, 189–192, 194–197, 217–218, 235–240; babypatient 60; beautiful 57, 240–241; fecal 34, 91; interesting 129, 246; little 62, 224; making 37, 65, 108, 129, 254; making new 129, 229; perfect 84, 117; shit 39, 87, 241 badness 95, 103; genesis of 96–112 baptism 78, 123, 214, 217–218

266 Index

beautiful 36, 37, 57, 95, 98, 99, 126, 156, 189, 191, 193, 201, 205, 210, 221, 237, 238, 240, 241, 251, 257, 258 beauty 244–259, 262; of the world 244–259 beg 234 believe/believer 15, 19, 27, 44, 65, 70, 72, 74, 75, 95, 98, 113, 118, 121, 124, 129, 132, 135, 138, 151–153, 156, 159, 160, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 182, 185, 186, 187, 194, 197, 199, 203–206, 209, 214, 218, 223, 235, 241, 252, 256, 258, 260, 261, 262 belly 42, 43, 57, 58, 59, 83, 125, 130, 131, 163, 195 Bender, L. 40 betrayal 46, 56, 72–74, 76–77, 79, 81; nocturnal 75, Bion, W. 14, 56, 86, 183, 187, 258 birth 33, 34, 56, 57, 74, 190, 191 biting 64, 65, 72, 74, 179 border-line: psychotic 176, 220, 257 bottom 32, 34, 87, 88, 89, 116, 127, 128, 145, 146, 147, 151, 155, 161, 169, 176, 185, 208, 224, 237, 239, 241, 249, 250 boundaries 65, 175, 260, 261 bowels 148, 248, 253 breast-feeding 90 Catholic: tradition 73; world 81 Caravaggio 10, 17; David with the Head of Goliath 5; Judith Beheading Holofernes 5 Chicago Institute (of Psychoanalysis) 40 childhood 4, 28, 31, 40, 88, 132, 135, 214; happy 4, 31 Christmas 21, 229–230; holidays 51 church 28–29, 36, 38–39, 72–73, 150–151, 153, 155 claustrophobia 38, 158, 186–187, 202, 234, 261 claustrum 87, 89, 112, 121, 123, 138–139, 144, 147, 158, 233–234, 238, 244, 256–257, 259; theory 261–262 cleaning 215, 253 Cleopatra 253–254 clinical evidence 1, 15 clinical material xiii–xiv, xvii, 27, 41, 113 colic 2, 4, 6, 18, 54, 57, 61, 82, 87, 105, 123, 125, 126, 139, 150, 161, 163, 168, 173, 175, 217, 219, 227, 232, 233, 248, 249 compulsory 3, 236, 253 concentration camp 126

concrete reality 41, 43–44, 55, 77, 131 confidence 227; break of 54 confusion: geographic 55; terrible 173, 201–202, 206; zonal 94 conscious 73, 100, 103, 126, 131 consulting room 6, 8, 11–12, 18, 37 contempt 10, 50, 51, 60, 83, 84, 140, 187, 190, 242, 247, 252, 255 control, omnipotent 174 Controversies 1941–1945 15 controversy, long-lasting 149 corner, remotest 59, 61 corpse 134, 139, 239 counter-transference 10, 27, 41, 44, 51, 55, 82, 84, 86, 110, 145, 183, 190, 226 cowardice 20, 44, 197 crazy 5, 13, 17, 30, 69, 93, 139, 168, 171, 179, 180, 219, 231, 232 ‘Crazy Place’ 2, 22, 75, 83, 84, 85, 92, 98–100, 102, 104, 125, 131, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 154, 160, 167 creative/creativity 55, 58 crisis 22, 41, 53, 94, 121, 123, 159, 167, 183, 184 cruelty 29, 105, 116, 167, 251, 255 culture: Western 132; Christian 130 dark 75, 90, 96, 102, 139, 140, 151, 177, 181, 182, 203, 206, 207, 208 death 33–34, 91, 129, 206, 223, 257 debasing 190 decision 82–83, 94, 120, 150–152, 165, 168, 207 delinquent 165–166 delusion 211, 232, 244–245, 256–257, 259 Delusion of the Clarity of Insight, The 257 defecate 34, 127, 145, 156, 199, 224 degradation 82, 113, 125, 135, 251 delinquent 62, 63, 98, 165, 166 dependence 30, 55, 65, 67, 86, 87, 98, 101, 104, 168, 181, 242 depression 78, 93, 139, 144, 199, 243, 251 depressive: anxiety 99; states 177, 204, 211 destruction/destructive 107, 126; violence 91 devil 130–137 diarrhea 84, 125, 146–147, 163, 168–169, 173, 175–177, 179, 198–199, 217–218, 220, 227–228, 241–242, 248–249, 252–253; baby 87; incipient 232

Index 267

digestive troubles 22, 36, 42, 54, 126 dirt 251, 253 dominating 5, 47, 64, 74, 112, 169 drama 256; of projective identification 260; sado-masochistic 194 dream 16, 33, 42, 90, 95, 160, 189, 223–224, 237; analysand’s 27, 261; awful 22, 74–75, 110, 118, 135, 224; babies 38–39, 250; erotic 9; foam-baby 103; forgotten 96, 99, 107; in-therectum 143; life 1, 4, 9, 39; long 16; representation 6, 7 Easter holidays 156 egocentricity 113–114, 116, 119, 141, 189–190, 193, 197, 200, 204, 215–216 Einstein 257 ejaculation 16, 17, 130 emotions 1, 7, 15, 16, 44, 64, 76, 81, 107, 118, 123, 151, 155, 156, 165, 167, 172, 186, 189, 208, 226, 243 envy 50, 53, 55, 98, 162, 187, 190, 194, 229 erotic 5, 9, 30, 163, 222, 223, 241 evacuate 138, 148, 175, 176, 198 evolution 1, 9, 11, 14, 39, 41, 94, 145, 255 exciting: games 64 explaining: things away 146 experience, analysand’s 24, 27 fascination 50, 197, 257, 259 fault 17, 18, 21, 119, 201 fecal: penis 87–89, 91, 92, 132, 134, 141, 146, 147, 151, 169, 172, 216, 246, 248, 249; babies 34, 91 feces: embellishment of 144 feelings 3, 6, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, 33, 35–38, 41, 43, 45, 49, 54–57, 64, 67, 68, 71–73, 80, 81, 85, 87, 93, 97, 99, 101, 103, 106–108, 110, 114, 117–119, 121, 123, 125, 136, 138, 145–148, 153, 154, 157–159, 161, 162, 165, 167, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 186–189, 193–196, 200–204, 208, 210, 212–214, 217, 218, 220, 223–226, 228, 229, 232, 234, 238, 241, 247, 250, 254, 257–259 femininity 4 filth 130, 131 fingers: anal masturbation 151, 153, 175; masturbatory phantasies 3, 100, 214; as representation of penis 38; up their bottom 176

first dream 3, 13, 16, 31, 33, 223 foam-baby 98–99 foetus 119 forgiveness 70–81 Freud/Freudian: genius 259; interpretation of own dreams 38, 39; own dreams 117; as a person 40; ‘Rat Man’ 39, 177 games 32, 34, 36–37, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 139, 239 gang: of adolescent fingers 147; friends 63, 65, 67 garden 65, 67, 68, 88, 142, 143, 187, 223 Garden of Earthly Delights, The 102, 177 gathering, transference 1, 9, 14, 20, 27, 33, 36–37, 39 generosity 135 geography 51, 54–55, 118, 195 god/goddess: attention 126; savage 74 godish 81, 144 golden grave 200–212, 253 grandiosity 215, 216 gratitude 55, 88, 89, 108, 118, 156, 173, 259 greed 17, 134, 170 goodness 82, 92, 259 gutter 64 hallucination 169 hate 7, 65, 106, 121, 122, 205, 218, 251 heart: attack 114; break your heart 231, 233, 255; change of 154 helpless 55, 80, 81, 119, 135, 148, 209 hemorrhoids 222–225 hero 138, 143 holidays: Christmas 51; Easter 156; holiday break 42, 111, 136; summer 42, 43, 111, 121, 160, 162 Home Alone (film) 91, 142 hope 4, 62, 120, 203, 205, 235–237 hopeless 80, 81 human mind 262 humility 41, 44 hunger/hungry 127 Huxley, A. 233 hypochondria 114, 142, 146, 255 identification 38–39, 62, 133, 140, 142, 146, 156, 163, 220, 260 illusions 10, 19, 146, 201 imagination 7, 55, 80, 227 impotence 162, 198 infant/infantile 4–7, 23, 39, 130, 184, 215, 222, 224–225, 239–240; attachment 32;

268 Index

delusion 131; eroticism 7; psychology 187; infantile significance 7; transference 9 insight 257–259, 262 internal mother 123, 138, 158, 171, 221, 260–262 internal world (of the internal mother) 158, 215, 244, 260 intestine/intestinal: fauna 247; flora 247 intimacy 19–20, 23, 154, 174, 187, 190 intrusion: intrusive identification 187 jealousy 24, 36, 55, 151, 161, 194, 199, 216, 218, 229, 255 joy: capacity for 3, 207, 208, 259; of thinking 242–243 joyful 154, 208, 214–215 Keats, J. 52 killing 16; of babies inside mother 76, 95, 106, 113 kindness 7, 19 Kleinians 53, 260 Klein, M. 39, 40, 53, 55, 260 latency period 67, 149 leader 92, 138, 139 life 70–71, 118–120, 133–135, 138–140, 142–143, 158–159, 166, 194–195, 209, 215, 218–219, 244–246, 251–257, 259; real 129, 208–209 life-in-the-claustrum 261 limits 2, 98, 99, 133, 141, 143, 150, 151, 168, 175, 184, 203, 205, 219, 247 love: ambivalence of 106; making 17, 47, 129, 166, 225; possessive 204 Lynch, D. 7 mad 3, 16, 32, 33, 34, 58, 79, 93, 98, 99, 102, 104, 124, 126, 132, 138, 140, 143, 162, 164, 171, 179, 180, 182, 198, 216, 227, 247, 254, 256 mania 207, 211 manic states 111, 147 marvel/marvellous 23, 32, 39, 55, 67, 70, 83, 93, 157, 161, 237, 251, 254, 258 masculinity 4 masochism/masochist 95, 106–107, 113, 116, 194, 246 masochistic: phantasies 3; phantasy life 4 masturbation 78, 79, 89, 103, 127, 143, 151, 152, 153, 164, 175, 206, 216, 225, 243, 255 masturbation phantasy 117, 166

matchbox 176, 178, 179, 181–185 material: clinical 27, 41, 113; transference 228 maternal transference 4, 25, 27, 30, 36, 45, 62, 89 mathematics 68, 69, 219, 257, 258 meaning 3, 13, 18, 19, 29, 30, 33–35, 37, 38, 41, 45, 48, 62, 70, 76, 77, 80, 82, 86, 93, 95, 96, 103, 106, 110, 113, 116, 119, 122, 125, 134, 138, 140–142, 144–146, 150, 152, 153, 159, 163–165, 167, 168, 171, 186, 190, 200, 203, 207, 208, 215, 219, 220, 223, 228, 230, 232, 233, 238, 241, 244, 245, 252, 254, 260, 261 Meltzer, D. 1, 35, 53, 56, 70, 95, 130, 138, 149, 158, 189, 213, 226, 258–262 mental life, passionate interest in 2–14 milk 36, 136, 137, 149 mind, human 262 miscarriages 60, 106, 111, 116, 119, 130 money 8, 111, 134, 135, 140, 141, 159, 170, 171, 172, 198, 216, 227, 234 monstrous 74 morality, primitive 74 mother: external 260–261; internal 260–261 mother’s: anal world 36, 123, 133, 138, 140, 221; compartments 188; headbreast space 112; inside 44, 89, 126, 130, 133, 161, 200–212, 219, 222, 224, 241, 260, 261; rectal space 145; rectum 87, 89, 126, 128, 146, 147, 174, 244, 248, 251, 255; vaginal space, 43 mourning 199–204, 211 music of the voice 53, 110, 145 murder 115–116 mysteries 22–23, 70, 257–258 narcissism 139, 168, 203–204, 211 negative capability 257 negative therapeutic reaction 53, 55 nightmare(s) 2–4, 6–8, 11, 13, 32–34, 36–38, 42, 60–61, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 90, 125–129, 150, 249–250; mother 11 night: mother 77; when the lights go out 88, 89, 92 nipple 54, 55, 56, 87–93, 222, 242 nursery 51, 108 obedient 80, 120, 121, 179, 206 objects: bad 31; good (internal) 16, 30, 31, 71, 97

Index 269

observation 13, 149, 261 obsession 92, 168, 177, 244, 253, 255 Oedipal (clinical) material 27, 41, 113 Oedipal/Oedipus complex 22, 24, 26 omnipotence 101, 107–108, 127, 132–134, 136, 139–141, 143–144, 161–162, 169–173, 175, 178–179, 183–184, 186, 192–195, 215–216; relinquish 172 orgasm 225 orifices 36, 238; confusion of 208, 221 original sin 130, 132 panic 101, 139, 145, 147, 219, 233; attack 113, 117 paradise 147, 161, 187, 210 parental feelings 81 passion 156–157, 259; lower the passion 53–69; passionate interest 1–14 past 16, 59; repetition of 41–52 patients, new 43, 46, 48, 54 paranoid-schizoid position 146, 155 part-object 32, 90; level 53, 146, 149, 159; material 169 patient: worrying about your patient 138–148 peaceful 126, 162, 193, 214, 249 penis 9, 17–18, 28–30, 33, 34, 38, 42–44, 47, 50, 54, 60, 65, 68, 75, 77, 84–92, 97–102, 105, 110, 115, 116, 130, 139, 145–147, 153, 161, 164, 168, 169, 174–176, 182–185, 191, 196, 198, 201, 206, 208, 211, 215, 216, 220, 222, 225, 234, 238, 240, 245, 246, 248, 251, 255–256; golden 105, 126, 134–136, 141, 151, 191, 210, 220, 223, 245; inside mother’s rectum 126; nipple- 54, 88, 89, 92, 222; see also fecal penis perfect baby 84, 117 permission 48, 50, 54, 60, 71, 76, 108, 120, 124, 126, 127, 143, 155, 192, 193, 223, 233, 246 persecutory: anxieties 20; object 29; phantasies 45, 184, 224 personality 23, 29, 154; parts of 29, 158, 261; infantile 154 perversion/perversity 82, 86–87, 92, 94, 95, 99, 113, 123, 137, 138, 232 phantasy 4, 8, 9, 18, 43, 47, 87, 89, 100, 101, 105, 117, 126, 134, 164, 166, 169, 174, 175, 180, 186, 191, 203, 207, 211, 224, 245, 256, 260, 261 phenomenology: of intrusion 261; of projection 146, 158, 171, 244, 260–262

placenta 41, 47, 53, 56–57, 110, 226, 232 pleasure 38, 51, 55, 87, 105, 106, 119, 161, 225, 232, 233, 257 pneumonia 21 Poincaré 257–258 position 45; depressive 112, 155, 177, 204, 211; paranoid-schizoid 146, 155; privileged 202; weak 5 pregnant 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 74, 83, 84, 85, 87, 98, 111, 130, 131, 132, 133, 143, 163, 177, 182, 196 pre-hallucinatory moments 259 pride/proud, 74, 130, 131, 144, 201 privacy 19 process, analytic 15, 167 progress 9, 30, 31, 68, 71, 123, 144, 172, 200, 209, 212, 243, 247, 250, 258 projection, phenomenology of 146, 158, 260–261 projective identification 38–39, 41–43, 45–47, 49–51, 87, 139, 146–148, 189, 192–193, 195, 213, 220–221, 238–239, 248–249, 260; dream 38 promiscuous 206–208, 222–223 prostitute 22–23, 25, 125, 229 psychoanalysis 15, 177, 185, 258– psychoanalyst 39–40 Psycho-analytical Process, The (Meltzer) 9 psychopath 153 psychotherapy 15–26, 82, 86 psychotic 104, 131, 139, 176, 220, 257 punishment 72, 74, 77, 80, 228, 233, 236, 242 ravishing 133, 259 recall (one’s dreams) 67, 75, 88, 91, 111, 154, 183, 233, 245 rectum 28, 87, 89, 97, 126, 128, 133, 134, 142, 143, 145–147, 174, 175, 199, 224, 238, 242, 244, 248, 251, 255 regret 19, 120, 139, 166 relationships 3, 9–11, 28, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 44, 61, 62, 72, 76, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 97, 100, 101, 104, 105, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125, 148, 151, 153, 161, 163, 164, 166, 173, 184, 186–187, 190, 211, 216, 225, 226, 232–233, 235, 236, 247–248, 254, 257 remorse 134 repentance 73, 177 research 257, 259–260, 262 rescued children 42, 57 resentment: toward father 2; toward mother 2

270 Index

responsibility 19, 55, 74, 152, 153, 168, 170, 172, 190 restore 126, 139, 141, 161, 174, 187, 206, 215, 246 rich 35, 55, 104, 140, 143, 186 Richard III 119 sadism 83, 92, 105–106, 116–117 sado-masochism 63, 84–85, 87, 106–107, 119 sado-masochist 62, 72–75, 77, 85, 115, 118, 120–121, 131, 165, 203 scared 3 schizophrenia/schizophrenic 40, 256, 259 secrecy 66, 67, 77, 80, 95–112, 132, 138, 154, 162, 163, 221 secret life 132, 139 seduction 20, 72, 97, 216, 242 selected fact 258 semen 130, 133, 141 sensuality 82, 92 sinister 35, 100–104, 140 sodomize 184 sex 98, 101, 134, 166, 167, 199, 225 sexual/sexuality, 4, 13, 17, 28, 35, 47, 61, 62, 53, 65, 67, 89, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 116, 117, 133, 142, 153, 155, 164, 166, 169, 197, 225, 243, 253, 254, 255 shit 34, 39, 67, 87, 123–129, 144, 145, 226, 227 shit-penis 91, 128, 175, 176 silence 19, 33, 65, 82–94, 102, 125, 129, 131, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154–157, 169, 183, 218, 220, 224, 228, 229, 232, 233, 239, 246–249, 253, 255, 257 smoking 172, 198, 234, 241 soiling 6, 177, 179, 233 Soviet: Parliament 126–129; revolution 126 split 4, 11, 23, 30, 39, 54, 55, 56, 73, 74, 80, 91, 99, 106, 116, 151 split part: of personality 23; of self 29 squander 166, 255 state of mind 85, 126, 127, 133, 143, 169, 187, 210, 215, 222 stupid 54, 65, 66, 77, 102, 103, 104, 109, 124, 134, 180, 215, 255 submission 71, 125, 248 suicides 114–116, 135 summer holidays 42, 43, 111, 121, 160, 162 supervision 27, 41, 69, 130, 158, 226–243, 259

suspicious 16, 66, 185, 236, 237 symbol 145, 163 symptoms 6, 25, 58, 69, 172 terror 188, 249 tenderness 4, 117, 121, 135, 254 therapeutic factor 1–14 theology 132 theorem 258 theory 24, 95, 117, 260–262 thinking, qualities of 95–112, 171–188 time, of analysis 165, 217 toilet 120, 227, 232–233; training 32, 34, 38, 87; mother 125, 232 tolerance 70, 80, 144, 209 torture 36, 75, 76, 85, 96–99, 106, 189, 234 transference 6, 9, 18; acting in the transference 4, 9, 10, 11, 27–40, 217, 229; acting outside the transference 1, 10, 51; analytic 14; evolution of 9; experiencing the session in the transference 15–26; experiencing the session outside the transference 15–26; gathering of 9; hysterical 5; maternal 25, 27, 30, 36, 41, 45, 62, 89; erotic 30; paternal 4, 25, 45; positive dependent 25; processes 9, 13; versus experience, 15–26 triumph 5, 41, 43, 47, 50, 73–75, 101, 103, 133, 158, 169, 171–188, 200–201, 206, 244 triumphant 17, 24, 50, 60, 76–77, 136, 194 trust 2, 47, 52, 54, 118, 119, 155, 218, 227 truth 4, 44, 104, 131, 165–166, 196; love for 82–94 Turandot (opera) 230 tyranny 92, 125, 230 über alles 247 ugly 88, 89, 98, 126, 150, 151 unconditional 134, 135, 136, 141, 144, 168, 201, 203, 204, 206, 244, 245, 251 unconscious 15, 27, 35, 103, 106, 162, 177, 202, 26; phantasies 15–26 uncontained 105, 150, 151, 152 unfaithful 16, 30, 167, 222 unthinkable things 7 vagina 28, 43, 44, 92, 133, 134, 152, 169, 180, 188, 199, 208, 222, 224, 238, 261

Index 271

values 126, 144, 158, 261; lowers the values 53–69 violation 6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 106, 113, 116, 124, 183, 187, 202, 260, 261 violence 83, 91, 141, 185 vitality 3, 80, 159, 242, 259 vomiting 54, 57, 190 wait 11, 12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 39, 47, 57, 64, 66, 83, 87, 90, 94, 101, 104,

108, 114, 120–121, 122, 127, 129, 135, 136, 149, 152, 164, 168, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 234, 235, 237, 259 waste: of analyses 170; body content 57; of opportunities 156; of qualities 141; of time 139, 229 Weddell, D. 260 world, communist 92 Zeus 105, 132, 133, 136, 231, 245, 253

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