In the Session

Dr. Moss's patient, a 38-year-old Black African woman in her third year of analysis, is a single parent to a six year old son. She sought analysis over concerns about her attraction to sadomasochism. She and her analyst appear to have worked successfully on this difficulty so that, by the time of the sessions described here, she was “less oriented to pain.”

It is worth reflecting on how the analytic couple arrived at this point. In the beginning the sadomasochistic element was directly present in her “accounts of … painful sexual encounters … [with] no openings for direct interpretive work,” which I assume means that the analyst did not want to interpret this directly in the transference, for instance by suggesting that the patient was describing her experience of the analytic intercourse between them. Such interpretation would probably have been experienced either as gratifying the sadomasochistic wish, or of being an unhelpful superego reprimand. Instead, the analyst chose to observe his countertransference response (the temptation to speak harshly and judgmentally) and contain this within his own mind. I think it likely that the patient internalized this containing function, which helped her to feel more settled in herself and gave her sexual life a more ordinary feel. This experience in the analysis could then be replicated in the outside world, where she found a partner of her own age with whom she hopes to settle down.

New developments are of course tentative and fragile, and now she becomes understandably preoccupied with whether her newfound mothering capacity, in identification with the patient/child-analyst/mother