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 general tenor of this session is one of insufficient empathy on the part of the therapist and an undigested fullness which contributes to a sense of deadness in the written material as presented by the therapist. The style of presentation is at times strikingly impersonal and distancing: for example, descriptions of the patient's feelings are put in the form of ‘the experience was one of …’ rather than ‘her experience …’, and such impersonality occurs several times. This reluctance to enter the patient's world is also seen in the rather wooden and unproductive nature of some of the comments and interpretations offered later. The therapist describes the sessions with her patient as ‘full and interesting’ but I can only agree with the first part of this description. It remains quite unclear what the therapist finds interesting.
The patient is introduced as being ‘a lesbian woman’. We are not told whose description this is - the patient's or the therapist's. If it is the patient's words, we are not told anything about the status this self-description has in her life, or any of the complexities that might be involved in this. The bald description suggests a fixity and a definiteness that may or may not apply. Why, furthermore, is the patient's sexual preference foregrounded in this way, as the opening statement? We are given no clues about this or its possible relevance to the clinical material to follow, and indeed the relevance, if there is any, is not made apparent. We are given no idea what the patient's possible conflicts about her sexuality might be, or how this relates to any therapeutic issues, yet her sexuality is made into a defining attribute of her. The therapist's act in making this opening statement is baffling.
In the next statement we are told that the patient has never had a sexual relationship with a man as a follow-up to the description of her as a lesbian. Again the relevance of this to the clinical material that follows seems to be almost non-exis