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I WOULD LIKE TO THANK DR. FRIEDMAN for offering us a glimpse of extremely interesting and thought-provoking clinical work and also a manner of presenting that work which I find very unusual
and noteworthy, especially with respect to its honesty and modesty.
In this presentation we have an example of analytic work in trouble, and the term employed to describe this trouble reveals underlying assumptions about how we understand the analytic process when it is going well.
Webster's gives two definitions for "stalemate"; one is: "… any situation making further action impossible …" The analytic process is a form of action, and things should be moving, going somewhere, we tend to feel. When things are stalemated, stuck, deadlocked, there is something wrong. The other definition of "stalemate" is: "in chess, the position of the king when so situated that, though not in check, he cannot move without being placed in check, there being no other available move; it results in a draw." (p. 1770) The analytic process is like a chessgame, a mock war. Freud introduced this metaphor in 1913, and it has served us well ever since. What is the analyst's king, that extremely vulnerable but indispensable piece without which there is no game? I think we would have to say the analyst's king is "understanding", and that this case is one in which the analyst's understanding is being attacked from all sides.
The patient's experience from the very beginning is filled with self-hatred and self-attack, reflecting two ways of organizing her internal experience or, as Sullivan would put it, two "personifications" of self. One version of herself, narcissistic, intellectual and sadistic, apparently organized around an identification with her father's intellectuality and contemptuous criticism, is cont