Trying to Find Someone: A Modern Kleinian Reconsideration of the Treatment of Mrs. C

This set of sessions offers a window into a classical psychoanalysis from the early 1970s, and in my view, it vividly demonstrates the limitations of the standard Freudian approach of that period. The patient is a young married schoolteacher, and the sessions we are discussing take place shortly after the birth of her daughter. The material addresses one of the most contentious ideas in the history of our field—penis envy and related assumptions about gender and development. So for that reason alone, this material seems worth revisiting from a contemporary vantage point. But more relevant to our present task is that this material demonstrates not just a technique for conducting analysis (which it certainly does), but a particular set of assumptions about the psychoanalytic process itself. In my paper, I hope to illuminate those assumptions and then contrast them with a contemporary perspective rooted in a blend of modern Freudian and Kleinian ideas.

I will begin by briefly considering an early session of the treatment, highlighting the major themes as well as the quality of the patient-analyst interaction in the early phase of the treatment. I will then turn to the patient's initial sessions back to analysis following the birth of her daughter and will consider some of the changes that begin to appear in that material and their possible meaning. I'll take a brief foray into those aspects of Kleinian theory that I see as relevant to this case. Afterwards, I'll turn to the later sessions, with a particular focus on how we might make sense of what is beginning to develop between patient and analyst from our current standpoint, and how we might intervene differently today.

The patient, Mrs. C, is a married schoolteacher who is several months into a five-day-per-week analysis. She begins the session with an extended discussion of her suppressed anger toward another teacher, whom she sees as taking advantage of her willingness to defer to others