The Case of J: Returning to the Office

29 October 2021

It’s a privilege to be asked to comment again on this very interesting work between analyst and patient, now that they have resumed face-to-face psychoanalysis after the many months of telephone analysis caused by Covid. It’s also extremely interesting.

To engage in this task, I decided initially against looking at the previous sessions and the commentaries on it. Indeed, I tried to go further and “forget” - in the spirit of Bion’s injunctions - any previous thoughts I had entertained. Paradoxically, this discipline also pertains to the “fact” of being informed that the analytic couple have reconvened face-to-face. That is obviously such a major factor, and it is what has motivated the editor to ask the same team of analytic commentators to comment on the present sessions. But this raises a dilemma, which we often meet in analytic work in various variations. The danger is that we will see everything in this particular light, which would certainly go against Bion’s injunction, because it would come under the heading of “memory”. On the other hand, how foolish would it be not to take this into account! So, perhaps artificially, I have oscillated between both perspectives, remembering and “forgetting”.

The dilemma continues in a subtle form within the sessions themselves, because, naturally, both patient and analyst referred to the break. And it must be right to take their meaning literally. However, only to hear these words referring concretely to the Covid break would be to lose the possibility that either party may, through their words, be speaking symbolically, which is of course an everyday occurrence in analysis as we are all trained to realise - though how easy is it to assume that “a cigar is just a cigar” when it might be more importantly a symbolic expression of something else.

My sense is that there is one particular theme, and then thread, of great importance throughout the three sessions. It is also present, through its absence, in the general