Two sessions with Catherine

The patient is a married woman in her late 30s with two children. She holds a senior position as an economist. In the preliminary sessions she complained about a sense of being stuck, having trouble with giving meaning to her life. She phrased it as feeling a lake of sorrow, without knowing where it came from and without being able to be in touch with it.

Catherine described what seemed to me a closed mental space, which soon opened in what I call the basic transference situation (e.g. Godfrind, 1993), namely the state of mind and train of associations evoked in the patient by being in the analytic situation. In other words, Catherine revealed and discovered a creative, automatic, preconscious functioning within herself. In this open mental space a flow of varying elements is produced and reported at several levels as Bion summarised in his grid (such as sensations, dream images, thoughts). The patient's inner object (representations) may be seen as at first unknown invariants expressing themselves in the flow of these ever-changing manifest psychic elements. In my idea of the way psychoanalysis works these invariants are transformed by a psychoanalytic process occurring internally which allows a process of deepening representation: that is the spontaneous psychic processing to which Catherine is open now within the analytic situation—a situation giving rise to new experiences which are again processed and so may become represented and change the inner object (representations).

In this approach the basic transference is viewed as creating a psychic process of deepening representation via the process of free association and occasional (unsaturated) interpretation which is somewhat different from a view of the transference as an internal object relation to the analyst which the patient comes to recognise via direct (saturated) interpretation of the experience. The presented approach does not exclude this internal object relation's point of view of the transference, but