You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The ways in which one can comment on a wonderful piece of clinical work such as this are many, and since Aisha Abbasi's presentation makes her patient M. come so much alive, it is tempting to piggyback on her insightful understanding of the case and say a few things I hope will add to our understanding. Moreover, there are elements in the paper that are especially appealing to me, notably the mother's seductive stance, the idea of contamination, and the reference to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. These are but a few of the many fascinating keys in which to read this case material from one's preferred perspective, but tempting as this may be, I will leave this aspect for later. What I wish to highlight first is what this paper has taught me and what change it has brought in me, as every good paper should.
A first important element, not entirely new to me, has now entered my set of beliefs thanks to Abbasi's convincing example. It is the belief that the patients we take into analysis, at least those we end up talking or writing about, frequently have something significant in common with our personal story. It seems that it is rarely by chance that we present one case rather than another, except of course when confidentiality issues are at stake.
The second thing I learned from this case narrative is that until now I had a rather simplistic approach to the question of long-distance analysis by phone or Skype. In view of what goes missing in sessions thus conducted, I doubted they could still be called analysis. I accord such great importance to the idea of embodiment, to the nonverbal experience, to the minute vibrations in the communication between patient and analyst, to the way in which body posture affects the analytic exchange, and things of the sort that I felt, until now, that long-distance analysis posed a real challenge, to say the least.