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If you want the doctor's help, you must reveal the wound2
THE EPIGRAPH IS TAKEN FROM The Consolation of Philosophy, written by Boethius, a Roman philosopher of the sixth century. It states a basic prerequisite of psychotherapy, that the patient talk honestly and openly to the therapist. The speaker, a woman of indeterminate age, named Philosophy, admonishes the sufferer to heed this necessity. I shall begin with a clinical vignette, in which resistance to this necessity, appearing as a transference reaction, declared itself.
A single professional woman came to analysis after the breakup of a long-standing relationship with an emotionally remote man. She was in a state of agitation and depression. While attractive, she dressed in rather drab fashion. She was clearly very intelligent, fluent in speech, with a quick, responsive alertness. While she told her story well and with evident honesty, there were periods of silence in her narrative. Sometimes she spontaneously resumed talking; at other times she seemed to need prompting by a question