Letter to the Editor

In her paper “Meeting the Sphinx” (IJP 103: 965-978), Emma Lunbeck elaborates on a patient’s dream I had reported in my paper about a Kleinian account of the Oedipus complex (IJP 85: 731-748).

Her idea of the patient’s dream as representing both the primal scene and defences against it is consistent with what I was saying in the paper. As she says, Klein suggests that the primal scene is an exciting but terrifying object in phantasy. One solution to it, my patient’s, is to identify in an excited and omnipotent way with this object - although, in bringing her dream, she is perhaps not only living out the phantasy but asking for help in thinking about it. So patient and analyst may “both face the Sphinx” (Lunbeck, 973), but from quite different standpoints. Lunbeck describes finding meaning as being just to solve riddles (973, etc.). She seems to suggest that a stance whereby patient and analyst instead “regard [the dream] together, from a safe distance, their relationship equalized and in a way neutralized by the shared activity of watching the dream, like two moviegoers side by side in the dark” (975) is either preferable or a risk worth taking.

Lunbeck does not explain or illustrate with any clinical example what this would in practice entail. It seems to me that this dangerously overlooks just what a dangerous mental state the patient is in - full of pain and its avoidance, damaging to the patient and to her objects. This includes, in telling the dream, wishing to immobilize the analyst by enthralling him and projecting her confusion into him. The work of the analyst is not to “regard from a safe distance”, let alone, worse, in “mutual wonder” (975), as if the analyst and the patient are “equalized and neutralized”. Instead, it is to help the patient to distinguish between her phantasy and reality and so to recover or develop an adult mind. Reducing analytic work to solving riddles denudes the analyst’s function, doing to their role what my patient was, in her excit