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I would like to begin by telling you about a situation that took place when I first began the practice of psychoanalysis. One-and-a-half years after completing the supervised analysis of a young woman, I ran into this woman in the stairway of the building where I had my consultation room; I happened to have a little time and invited her in. Here she told me that she wanted to see the place again to which she had come regularly for over 2 1/2 years, because she was still dealing with some of her feelings from that time.
She then said she had a dream about me. In the dream I was one of the guards outside the chamber of a concentration camp. She dreamt that she was entering the bunker, knowing what was about to happen to her, that she would never get out of there alive and that I, looking at her sadly, was about to shut the door of the bunker tightly behind her.
The former patient was not willing to talk about this dream with me because she did not want to take the psychoanalysis any further. It was by chance that she had met me now, and that was what made her think of the dream again. She said the dream did not upset her because she did not have the feeling I had shut the door behind her sadistically, but because there was nothing I could do to change it, since I, too, was just a little cog in the wheel of the machinery of destruction in a concentration camp.
As she was telling me about the dream, I felt a sharp, stinging sensation in my nose, which I know is the sign of a cold coming on. I could not worry about this nagging physical sensation that day; if anything, I gave in to it. The next day I fell ill with a high fever and a severe case of strep throat infection the likes of which I had not had for twenty years.