Learning to Ride the Horse: The Back and Forth of an Analytic Treatment and Setting: The Case of Raquel

Raquel is about 50 years old and a partner at an important multinational corporation, in which she is very successful and holds one of the highest positions. She consulted me for the first time in 1999 for feelings of emptiness and her inability to sustain any relationships that involved intimacy. She is tall, looks poised and self-confident, and takes great care in her appearance. During the initial interviews she expressed her despair and suffering. She described a previous treatment that lasted for several years during which she had made no progress. She doubted that it would be any different this time. Talking about her previous therapist she said, “Poor woman, she did everything she could. But perhaps it's me, something impossible.” (I underscore the something to myself.)

In her work she felt that she deserved more, especially in her salary. She felt that the company was unfair to her in view of the time she had devoted to them and “the years of my life I lost there”, she said. Her greatest complaints hinged on her loneliness and her inability to obtain satisfaction (any sort of satisfaction) in life.

In the first hour she expressed the idea: “I know something is wrong with me, but I don't know what.”

Raquel was born into a very poor home, in a little suburban area. She had one sister, four years younger. During Raquel's childhood her mother was devoted to the care of Raquel's father, an alcoholic with a chronic psychosis that gradually deteriorated and led to his institutionalization at a psychiatric hospital, where he eventually died. The father was described as always speaking to imaginary enemies in a loud voice, a situation which caused Raquel great shame and humiliation.

Raquel's mother was experienced as overwhelmed and distracted. She was unable to breast feed Raquel as a baby and Raquel felt as if she were invisible to her mother. The patient, in turn, reciprocated by utterly underestimating her mother and treating her with great arrogance and a controlled