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From S.' story we learn about his fascination with post-apocalyptic games. Indeed, the picture of his reality evokes the atmosphere of ‘Apocalypse Now’. The very first episode of the film shows us the protagonist who is drunk, locked alone in a hotel room, facing the unbearable task of his life: to ‘terminate Colonel Kurtz’ (with a later adjustment: ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’). The protagonist's predecessor, sent on the same mission earlier, stayed with Kurtz and became his second-in-command. He wrote a letter to his wife that he would never be back.
The picture of the unbearable conflict patient S. experiences—the ‘killing’ his father and identifying with him—is shown to us in close-up. A little farther away, ‘in the kitchen’, we see an aloof, also rather ‘dead’ mother, unable to provide hope, comfort or food. S. was not at home when his father hung clinging to the edge of the balcony and was unable to rescue him. He did not witness his father's life, nor did he witness his father's death. In fact, he has not buried him yet, while the loss of his mother is looming ahead, and he risks to fail in saving her from a life-threatening disease. His marriage hangs by a thread. He has not developed a ‘deep relationship’ with his assistant K., who seems to represent a lateral track of his transference on the therapist.
So, the words ‘irretrievably’, ‘forever’, ‘never’ seem to flash at every turn, making the psychodynamic task extremely difficult and as if doomed. The description of the patient's story and dynamics is imbued with the therapist's countertransference experiences, where despair and hopelessness predominate.
The patient assumes that hatred caused his father's death. If we consider this statement as a projection, we can look at what is happening in transference like at the work of hidden destructiveness in systemic elimination the fruits of therapy and the therapist's efforts to revitalise the process. The contact between these two people and the life of the