A Comment on ‘The Case of Stevie’1

‘I've told you many times I have trouble holding on to a feeling here. In that feeling, it was easier to hold on to you … When there's a good connection, I can hold on to the memory of you.’

Dr. Alice Jones has provided us with a vivid account of a long and complex analytic experience with a difficult and very provocative patient. From the very beginning, her report contains and awakens in its readers weighty and conflicting images. Jones's analytic life begins when her patient Stevie is diagnosed with leukemia and is threatened with death. Life and death, disconsolate weeping, her sister's illness, maternal depression and aloofness, her father's alcoholism and physical and emotional ineptness—top this off with her name, Stevie, which probably reflects her mother's desire to have a son.

In Stevie's relationship with her analyst, one sees an unyielding passivity, resolute anorexia, and an apparent emotional stonewalling so as to force the analyst into making veritable ultimatums to defend her patient's life or, at the least, to occasion intense and constant attention from Jones. Simultaneously, Stevie is fiercely attached to Jones; she has a permanent sadomasochistic bent and evokes an uninterrupted parade of characters who remind Jones of Scheherazade's tales in the Arabian nights.

Her analysis contains protracted periods of apparently circular movement interspersed with some ascendant upward spirals, but often other downward spirals.

She produces images and pregnant descriptions that hook into readers' minds. To me, they suggest that, just like the account itself, Stevie is desperately trying to keep herself permanently etched in her analyst's mind. She manages this by forcing her analyst to assume her patient's desire to live, while in her day-to-day life Stevie has sufficient motivation and strength to achieve a modicum of professional success. She also etches herself in the analyst's mind by trying to bring her into a stimulating sadomasochistic relationship