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This clinical case presents difficulties that are frequent in the analysis of patients today: a reasonably well-organized psychic functioning, with fragile and vulnerable aspects, kept separate from contact with oneself and with the other. The fear of a ‘leukaemic’ proliferation of these various parts, which become characters named in the analytic dialogue, causes defensive freezing or stalemate (as soon as one part is contacted, another intervenes and chases it away). Alice Jones describes this in the case of Stevie, a woman who began analysis at the age of 35 and is still continuing today almost 20 years later. ‘I've been seeing Stevie for all of my analytic life. … She wanted to stay untouched.’2 Jones is aware of the difficulties of the situation the analytic pair is involved in: separation anxiety, excessively real characters, role changing (at times the analyst finds herself playing the part of rigid, controlling ‘Little Boy’, who looks down from on high at ‘Baby’, the needy part capable of growth). With this lively clinical material, she shares with us a cyclic path between repetition and change.
Stevie is terrified of letting herself go with the surge of emotions that overflow her capacity to hold. Little Boy is a tyrannical rigid part that controls her. But he is also the self-holding part that prevented her from dying frozen alone, offering her shelter in an igloo. To survive, she has had to proceed (since the birth of her sister?) like the person with the broken leg in the film Touching the void, her psychic apparatus limping along, keeping her weak suffering part subjected and dumb.
Mirror-like, the analyst sometimes becomes the one that despises the needy part, exasperated by the stalemate in the analysis; at others, she blocks emotions—which should be drifting like dolphins—in the characters; at others still, her worries about how the analysis is proceeding flood the potential space between analyst and analysand.
When the analyst speaks to one of Stevie's