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Presenter: This is a case which has already been discussed (Seminar 4). I would like to mention the change that occurred between that session and the most recent one. The patient began to move more freely after I mentioned envy in the interpretations. She lay down on the couch, and although she was silent as usual, I noticed that she was moving. Instead of just lying still, she seemed to be trying to find a comfortable position and was therefore moving her whole body. I also had the impression that she was mentally more mobile. After a silence of about fifteen minutes – the usual length – she said, “I feel untied. I recognize myself in these bad things I think and feel, like envy which makes me feel destructive”.
Bion: From the negative point of view of the patient, I think she is describing a fear of the loosening of whatever it is that holds her together. So although there can be the comfort or relief of feeling less rigid, more mobile, there is also the anxiety that whatever binds her together into one personality is disintegrating – as if the personality was no longer held in any tense structure. One of the advantages of the patient's being able to feel better – it is very difficult to say what is meant by that, but it usually means some nice feeling – is that it gives a certain degree of confidence to go on having more analysis if there appears, in spite of these horrible feelings, a loosening of the fibres; it is a compensation. It is also one of these situations in which the presence of the analyst is very important – one always assumes that, but sometimes it becomes more apparent. In other words, while the patient is having a horrible fifty minutes, it is helpful to have the analyst present who is not feeling like that in the same fifty minutes.
P: She experienced the feeling of being untied as something good, and she expressed the fear that she would lose the ability to become less rigid.
B: She can express fear in a number of different ways, but fundamental