A Note on the Splitting of Interpretations

The patient who has been listening to the voice or inflections of voice of the analyst rather than to the matter of his interpretations is familiar to us all. I should like to draw attention to what one might call a refinement of this mechanism of defence.

Mrs. A. B. is in her late forties. She is what one may call an old war horse of analysis. She was for several years in analysis until her analyst left to go to another country. She bears an unceasing grudge against the analyst for this desertion and for other reasons as well. During her first analysis and following it she took up work of a psychotherapeutic nature without any recognized qualifications and she earns her living successfully. Previous to this she had a career as an actress.

At times, she lets drop remarkable statements such as: (i) 'I would rather die than say that' (this was said apparently without any relevance to material at the time and has remained totally unexplained; (ii) 'I am an opera singer' (in reference to a sketch which she used to perform—a skit on opera singers). Tackled about this, she readily admitted with one part of herself that she was not an opera singer, but firmly fixed beneath this was the absolute conviction that she was and could be; (iii) On the subject of dependence on me she said, 'If you are necessary to me, I am just as much necessary to you.' This had arisen out of an exhaustive review of her attitude to her own psychotherapeutic patients, in which she had acknowledged momentarily that her attitude of identification with her patients and her use of them for her own personal therapeutic purposes was to say the least of it not quite what ought to happen.

Recently she has taken on two new patients—one a man who at the second interview told her that his sister was in Broadmoor for infanticide. This was said apparently without any feeling and the 'infanticide' turned out to be child murder of children aged five and three. Mrs. A. B. took this quite calmly but on sec