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On a Saturday afternoon in late January 1987, the warm sunshine proclaiming that the worst of the winter was over, I held critical converse with myself as I wandered up and down the hills of the Kaiserstuhl, pondering over the sessions of the last three weeks of analysis with Boris. Had I timed my interpretations correctly? Had the formulations not been too direct? Had I prepared my interpretive work adequately? What, in his innermost being, could and would the boy make of what had been said? In the last session before this weekend, after the sequence of interpretations I was now reviewing so critically, he had hissed at me more or less as follows after a long, long silence: 'You cow!'
I had accepted this and answered with a question of my own: 'And what are you if I am a cow?'
Boris had replied without hesitation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: 'A flower!'
To which I had responded: 'A flower with some prickles and thorns on its stalk!'
'Yes', had been his affirmative rejoinder.
I had then answered: 'And the cow must be careful not to tread on the flower, as after all the flower cannot run away.'
If I had had any idea that, already on the eve of this day of my doubts—that is, after the last session before the weekend—Boris had come to the end of an extremely alarming period of refusing food which had lasted for several weeks and for the first time shown a healthy appetite again, while appearing to his parents cheerful and as if released from a spell, I would certainly have wandered with a lighter heart through the almost genteel array of ochre-coloured vineyards and orchards.
When Boris's mother telephoned me asking for an urgent consultation for her son, she said, choosing her words precisely, that the onset of his spastic constipation for which she had been referred to me had coincided with an operation on his father's heart three years earlier, when Boris was a year old, and with an illness of her own when Boris was no