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When I was asked to respond to Ignês Sodré's presentation, I felt myself to be instantly transported into the psychic situation she has described as I encountered my very own primal scene fantasy. I imagined the audience assembling for the lecture with a wish to enter into intellectual, professional, and emotional intercourse with the eminent speaker, with myself, as respondent, coming in-between, as if entering into the bedroom, separating lecturer and audience.
However, on considering the subject further, I realised that the triangular situation inherent in the structure of the annual Enid Balint Memorial Lecture lends itself well to examining in more detail one of the central psychic facts that both individual analysts and couple psychotherapists encounter in their consulting rooms. In fact, the very occasion of the Enid Balint Memorial Lecture is about fostering a shared and creative intercourse between our linked professions, and in this spirit I will attempt to respond to Ignês Sodré's paper from the couple therapist's perspective.
Ignês Sodré, in the title of her lecture evokes, and then in the body of the text enlarges on, Freud's Wolf Man's classic dream as it relates to the primal scene, and it is no coincidence that this very case history, with the dream at its heart, was chosen by the late Dr Robert Morley to consider the nature of the intercourse between our linked disciplines—couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (Morley, 2012[2006]).
In his paper “A couple therapist looks at the Wolf-Man” (2012[2006]), Morley notes Freud's lack of curiosity about the sort of woman (Teresa)