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Reading this neatly typed and orderly presentation of Brian's story, I feel inhibited from marking or underlining the passages which interest me - from making a mess of the pages. Separately, I cover my notepad with a mess of unconnected responses. Brian's conflicted presence is powerfully evoked.
I'm gripped by Brian's story as it unfolds, and feel that therapist and client are equally gripped. Their therapeutic alliance seems well established. Despite the sense of stuckness, the work seems alive. The therapist is able to think during a session, aware of countertransference experiences, moving between analytic reflection and spontaneous involvement. I feel emboldened to exercise a similar freedom - while remaining aware that reverie of this kind cannot amount to an interpretation, since it does not form part of an ongoing dialogue.
The therapist's unanswered questions are important - not for what the answers might be, but because they show the therapist struggling with the messiness of not knowing. I am strongly tempted to order my notes, to begin theorizing about the material. I feel I must stay with my own unanswered questions.
Brian started therapy when he was doing his course, and his therapy seems a bit like his coursework. He gives himself assignments - to visualize, fantasize, think what he really wants. Intellectualizing his therapy may be helping him to remain with the therapy, but is it getting in the way? What fantasies would surface if Brian stopped