Commentary by a Member of the Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling, and the Circle of Analytical Psychology, London

I much appreciated reading about Pauline and her therapist, and I am grateful to them for their generosity in providing the material. I would like to comment around a couple of areas of significance that have emerged: the idea of therapy as adventure, and the development of therapeutic trust.

A patient once told me that the Latin root for adventure (advenir = to arrive, come to) originally had a military meaning to do with being ‘in the thick of it’; for example, coming to the foot of the walls of a citadel which is about to be stormed. True or not etymologically, it is this word and image which has presented itself to me in response to Pauline and her therapist's story.

There is an obvious analogy here with Pauline in her citadel room. However, the image of Pauline and her therapist up close to the walls of a citadel is also an image of the defences against relating to each other and to others more fully - the heart, as it were, of the therapeutic task and adventure. These defences are there to prevent undeveloped sides and unassimilable experiences coming to the fore - in Pauline's case, for example, needy, vulnerable, shadowy-aggressive aspects of herself. They are automatically treated as toxic and threatening to the conscious personality in its relations both internally and with others.

Analytic psychotherapy is built on our own personal experience of the good enough therapeutic environment allowing habitually suppressed or undeveloped forms of relating and bad experiences to be sympathetically (gk sym = together; pathos = feeling) engaged with and met. In this way the old limiting and isolating states can break down, thereby allowing new ones to emerge in the form of learnt experience. Pauline presents with depression and anxiety but has to keep the therapist ‘at a distance’ from them. Depression and anxiety are abstract (i.e. non-sympathetic) attempts to name and relate to these old states. She comes in the hope of them being given meaning and life through analy