Whatever Happened to the Cat?—Interpersonal Perspectives on the Self

I WANT TO BEGIN WITH A clinical example from Gill's and Hoffman's (1982) book on transference. This is an excerpt from a young woman's session with a "classical" analyst, committed to silence; or, perhaps intimidated into silence by the recording of the session.

P: You know, it is true that my pets were consistently taken away from me. The bird was, the cat was, the rabbit was. And my sister's cat killed my turtle, and one of my goldfish … the two smaller, the incidents that occurred when I was smaller—the bird and the cat—I never did understand. It seemed to me a question of convenience; the rabbit I understood, because I was going to camp, and my mother just didn't want to be bothered taking care of a rabbit over the summer. Also I expect they were going away for awhile. But the bird, which we had when I was very small, under three, was given to my grandmother. I don't know why. And he died. And the cat was left in R [place] at the end of one summer, ostensibly because he was hiding in the furnace room, and my mother just didn't feel like crawling around on pipes and fishing him out. And also maybe she felt a little guilty. I suppose she thought that he was very happy there and that he would be miserable back in the apartment, which was no doubt quite true. But I was very unhappy about that; it seemed, uh, wrong. He was my cat or so it had been proclaimed. … There's something about that cat, I guess, but I [sigh] I don't know exactly what. There are, I suppose, about fifteen things about that cat, and I don't know which is important and which isn't or what it all means.

What follows is the authors' gloss of the session with a special emphasis on transference: "The patient's sense of puzzlement at her parents' behaviour and her feeling that she was treated unfairly by them seems to parallel her experience of the immediate interaction with the therapist. He, too, she must feel, leaves her to divine