A Candidate at Work: The Case of Ms. N

Ms. N., in her late twenties, first consulted in February 2017. She had found my name through the American Embassy in Madrid since she was looking for an English-speaking psychoanalyst. When she came in for the first interview, she took on an amused, ironic look as if there were something ridiculous or funny about the situation, or about me, and that we both knew it. She was consulting because she would vomit after having sex.

She described herself as engaging in predatory sexual behavior, compulsively seeking out men to have sex with and then, inevitably, vomiting. Once she had seduced the men, she would see her friends and tell great stories of her conquests, making them laugh. In her telling of this, there were repeated references to eating or devouring men; when I linked it to the vomiting, she saw the connection, and quickly understood my tentative interpretations.

Clever, witty, and cultured, Ms. N. grew up in the USA, and worked in Latin America. She had a knowing, worldly, cynical attitude of someone who’s seen it all and isn’t surprised by anything, and tried to maneuver me into a complicity of just how thoroughly absurd a psychoanalytic interview was. At the end of the first interview, she guffawed and said that if she had had to cast someone as a psychoanalyst, she would have cast me exactly as I was dressed, and in my consulting room.

During the initial three interviews she mentioned that her grandfather had touched her when she was nine, without specifying how, and that her father was violent towards her mother. He was an alcoholic and lost his job; the whole family had to be quiet during the day when he was sleeping on the sofa. He swung from being the life of the party, laughing and playing the guitar, to being a raging fury and “strangling her brother”1 when she was seven. She talked of growing up in a violent, sexualized2 and dangerous neighborhood where she learned to be tough. The descriptions of these incidents and their context were per