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It has been a pleasure to spend time with Dr Hinze’s paper. There is a bounty of introductory and concluding information in addition to the three reported analytic sessions that I approach with two aims: to elucidate how I see Dr Hinze working and to weave in commentary and questions that specifically focus on the analyst as an older man.
Dr Hinze begins the paper with a personal element, an association. The association is to Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Old Man and the Sea, which Dr Hinze pointedly summarizes as “the struggle of an old, experienced fisherman for his captured Marlin, which finally ends with sharks destroying and devouring his precious prey”. The choice to begin with an association, a thought that arises from both conscious and unconscious contributions, strikes me as important. It resonates with what he will stress in the following pages about his clinical technique characterized by analyst focus on transference–countertransference enactments, reverie and unconscious-to-unconscious communication.
Dr Hinze explains the intended message of the association “an old analyst exposes himself to the depth of impending hopelessness and wrestles with the question of whether destructive dynamics will ultimately gain the upper hand”. Dr Hinze sees a challenge for the analyst to contend with unintegrated aspects of the patient: the patient seeking help and the patient who acts like a destructive shark threatening the work with the analyst. The careful wording “destructive dynamics” that might “ultimately gain the upper hand” leaves open the possibility of the analyst’s destructive pressures also entering the transference–countertransference.
In the second paragraph, Dr Hinze introduces Mr A. as an applicant to the Institute Clinic. Mr A. had just terminated a “lengthy” (10 years, we later learn) analysis but was suffering with a worsening (long-standing) sleep disorder. The patient was 38 years old. Dr Hinze was 75 years old. They met once as part of a lega