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The tonality, rhythm and emotionality in Eekhoff's paper impresses us with her extraordinary capacity to take deep within herself the suffering her patients bring to her. In her writing style she conveys how much she prizes emotional receptivity as a valuable psychoanalytic tool, especially when working with traumatic states.
In her opening statement, “Life is difficult enough without trauma,” Eekhoff (2021) underscores the fact that we are all emotional creatures, and as such, experience moments in our lives in which our own primal affects emerge and disturb us, and confront us with the challenging task of having to work our way through them and make meaning of them. We strive to create our own containing narratives, and, if our narratives are founded in the search for truth, we learn from experience (Bion, 1962a). I use truth in the sense described by Civitarese as “the emotionally lived experience in the here and now” (2016, p. 450). When truth is so unbearable that it can elude us, we need the reverie of another mind, in the here and now, to help us along.
We know from Bion (1962b), that the capacity to think and have containing thoughts is a developmental achievement that, to begin with, relies on maternal reverie, and, if we consider Winnicott (1960, p. 589) on the holding functions of good enough mothering. These functions mitigate for the infant the undue intrusion of the raw sensual elements that impinge upon the immature psyche, and allow development to proceed along