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I usually pay a great deal of attention to the very first moments between patient and analyst. The way the patient enters the analytic ‘stage’, including the first phone call, carries a number of implicit messages. These are not to be interpreted as such, but provide useful hints about the form of transference that is being introduced. Here, right from the start, Ana is asking for special treatment on account of her professional commitments. The analyst responds by accommodating her while making himself uncomfortable with the time schedule. However, this does not seem to have been addressed at the time as something significant in Ana's beginning analysis. So I am not surprised that the session the analyst chose to present is one where, a few months later, he is once again asked for special arrangements, to the point of feeling that he has ‘no way out’.
This makes me put the focus not so much on the patient's conscious dilemma between her feeling worthless and her need to seduce, only to feel thereafter disdain for the seduced. I am rather drawn to asking myself: to whom is she actually addressing her requests for ‘special arrangements’, to whom is she speaking about her dilemma, and what is this communication aimed at obtaining? In other words, just like Elias Barros, although from a different angle, I try to stay focused on the transference as the axis along which to follow the unfolding of the material. In so doing I read all of the patient's gentle assaults on the analytic setting as queries addressed to a father, himself ‘too committed’ to his social and financial business and, I surmise, too busy with a quest of his own for narcissistic perfection, a quest he ‘delegated to his children’. The theme of ‘availability’ is thus running through the material. The patient is at the same time enacting her own unavailability, thus identifying with her father, and testing the availability of the analyst. What is not yet clear is what is at stake under the guise of availabi