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It is an interesting challenge to be invited to comment on material from a session without any background introduction to the case. But in terms of this session I think this is a patient couple who are helpfully persistent in describing their difficulties
despite their being different to an important degree from those which the therapists interpret. On the other hand the therapists seem to me to be persistently missing opportunities to grasp the key to this session as it appears both indirectly in the material and directly in the here and now of the transference relationship.
In the first paragraph one phrase leaps off the page, ‘extraordinarily perturbing’. It is not elaborated, but I take it that the therapists felt perturbed by the lift event, since there is no material about the patients' reaction to it. The therapists apparently didn't think about this feeling and try to use it in the session. I would see it as countertransference, possibly reflecting a relationship both between the couple and between the patient couple and the therapist couple, which is experienced as fused, in which an obstacle to instant connection between therapists and patients is felt to be extraordinarily disturbing. Next, and connecting with this thought, I wonder why the patients shake hands with the therapists at the start of every session (this is clearly not the first). And why they still have to be met at the lift. Is there an enactment of something infantile here, and anxiety about not being able to trust a different kind of emotional contact if immediacy and touch are not maintained? I think the later material about the couple having to phone each other constantly resonates with this.
Mr and Mrs S say there are no traumas to report, and I wonder if this means they have been ‘playing safe’ and avoiding conflict for some reason. The word ‘trauma’ itself suggests an awareness of trauma even as it is being denied. The therapist goes straight into offering an interpretation, apparently