Commentary on Abbasi

Aisha Abbasi has offered us a moving and challenging case report. I see that I mean moving in various senses of the word: the treatment migrates, and the emotions flowing within the treatment are extremely poignant. The treatment is long and winding. There is migration, return to home, a spiral process between India and America as the treatment deepens and takes its astonishing turns (as treatments that will work surely must).

I start at the beginning with the earthquake and its moments of confusion and recognition. This is a point of contact that reverberates. The symbol of the earthquake becomes increasingly saturated. Beginning in a fact of weather and fearful upheaval, we come to understand the earthquakes in the wars of India and Pakistan, in the trauma to the analyst's father and to the analysand. These traumas, though different, overlap: an earthquake in 1947 with Partition (between India and Pakistan), the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war in which the analyst's father is taken prisoner, and the earthquake of the patient's sexuality, the eruption of desire that shakes his world, requiring flight, return, more flight, and then some settling.

The challenge in Abbasi's paper is twofold. We are asked to consider carefully the analytic implications of new technologies—our work with devices such as phones and Skype. These experiences all require that we confront our often unexamined definitions and constructions of the analytic frame. This analytic couple made complex and multiple uses of the setting for their work, which I understand using Bleger's enlarged definition of the frame (1967). Throughout the work, the analyst attended to the stability of the setting as the ground on which analytic insights into the work would emerge. She was actively engaged in understanding both the transference and the countertransference as these processes were informed by the various settings and their meanings.

What I would say is unique in this report is the gradual and inexorable process in