I am grateful to Dr Böhm for presenting with great honesty and openness a piece of his analytic work—the first analytic session that he conducted after being invited to participate in the ‘Analyst at Work’ forum. He succeeds in making available in the writing, not only his own conscious and unconscious experience, but also the unconscious of the analytic relationship (which is greater than the sum of the unconscious of the analyst and that of the analysand).

I shall begin this discussion with an experiment: I will treat the information and commentary offered by Dr Böhm concerning the patient's history and the history of the analysis as an extended reverie experienced prior to the patient's ‘arrival’. In treating Dr Böhm's entire text as a single entity—as opposed to