An Alternative to the “Traumatizing” Vacation: The Enriching, Expansive Vacation

Vacations often evoke a surge of well-being in us, a feeling of expansiveness that enriches the self as well as our relationships with others. The novelty of travel enables patients and analysts alike to try on new identities, to be less hide-bound by routinized existences.

Analysts who adhere to a need deficit model of preoedipal dependency in which the patient, like the child without his or her mother, would be helpless or hopeless in the analyst's absence rarely address the positive aspects of vacations for both analysts and patients. This deficit perspective also stems from many analysts' countertransferential needs to be needed. That the patient can survive and even thrive during analysts' vacations may be defensively guarded against by analysts who countertransferentially need to be mirrored or idealized, or themselves have trouble separating from their patients.

Freud (quoted in Fussell, 1987, p. 13) also believed that a great part of travel's pleasures resided in early wishes to escape the family and especially the father. One can extend this premise to include many patients' wishes to escape the grasp of the preoedipal mother (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1976).

Ferenczi (quoted by Abraham [1918, ]) strongly addressed our need to vacation—to empty ourselves (vacate) of our habitual modes of living—when he wrote, “The longing of mankind for holidays is as great as for bread” (p. 349). Yet, it was also Ferenczi (1919/1950) who commented on his patients' Sunday neuroses. Ferenczi maintained that even one day away from the routine of therapy—the most mini of vacations—was anxiety-provoking for many patients.

Freud (1913/1958) likewise noted the negative effects brought about by weekend interruptions. “Even short interruptions have a slightly obscuring effect on the work. We used to speak jokingly of the ‘Monday crust’ when we began work after the day of rest on Sunday” (p. 127).