Commentary 21

Whose underwear is under there? ‘Fruit of the Loom’ 'cause it fits

(Advertisement, 1984; cf. Garber, 1992).

‘Once upon a time’ is how fairytales begin, and how horror stories and love stories narrate events from the safe distance of yesterday. Similarly, it is with ‘Yesterday’ that Dr Jacobs's quasi-adolescent patient begins the first session: ‘A woman came out of your office yesterday … Then I thought you are with an attractive woman. Then I had the thought about wearing women's clothing … and how erotic that feels. I like red clothes, red is sexy and vibrant; quite erotic’. He must have had this fantasy the day before on entering the practice and/or in the waiting room, just before seeing his analyst. Why does he talk about ‘yesterday’ and not ‘right now, today, at the moment’? Why did he wait a day? Neither does he talk today about ‘tomorrow’, the first day on which his analyst is not at his practice. This man seems to live at the safe distance of ‘yesterday’ and to reach neither ‘today’ nor ‘tomorrow’.

First, I will attempt to summarise selectively Dr Jacobs's thinking and interpretation, as I understand them. Then, I will turn to examine the patient's references to the body. Finally, I will make an alternative proposal. In my inevitably summarised account, it will not be possible for me to do justice to Dr Jacobs's constant self-scrutiny, his detailed and frank report, or to the moving and complex struggle between analyst and patient concerning the truth of their transference relationship.

After throwing himself on to the couch, the patient, tense with stage-fright, metaphorically undoes his discreet and boyish clothing to startle his analyst with a cross-dressing fantasy, rather as he once startled his mother by presenting her with a dead frog covered in blood—‘red is sexy’, he says. Unperturbed by this, the analyst seems to consider three hypotheses: first, that the patient is competing with the woman for the analyst's exclusive love by turning himself into the a