Thinking Under Fire1

To devote the maximum possible space to the treatment and the sessions, I will restrict myself to a brief description of Dolores, a patient who was in analysis with me a few years ago, at a frequency of four sessions a week. A single woman in her forties, Dolores's customary expression was sad and resigned, rather wild and unappealing. She was rather unfeminine and dressed as if she were trying to avoid being noticed. I rarely saw her smile at me, although she was not lacking in humour. After giving up some music studies, she had obtained a diploma in a paramedical profession and was working in a hospital emergency service, where she was in frequent contact with suicidal patients. Dolores herself was suffering from depression and anxiety and was regularly abandoned by men with whom she was seeking to have a stable relationship; she had undertaken a course of psychotherapy and then a long psychoanalysis, each time with a woman. In the course of these treatments, Dolores's anxieties had been connected essentially with a series of periods that she had spent in hospital between the ages of 2 and 4 years old because of a recurring infection, which had isolated her from her family. She still bore a strong grudge against her parents, whom she criticized bitterly for having neglected and abandoned her, and her emotional wounds were far from healed. In spite of the negative tendencies that she had displayed with me from the outset, I thought that Dolores was showing enough insight to be able to pursue a work of elaboration that had not yet been taken to its natural point of conclusion.

After three years in analysis with me, Dolores retrieved the memory that she had been subjected to sexual abuse by a neighbour between the ages of 5 and 8. She had not dared to talk about it either to her parents or to her therapists, or even to me, until that day. I then understood that the separation anxieties that Dolores was reproducing in the transference had