Discussion of “The Older Analyst at Work: The Old Man and the Sea?”

Eike Hinze describes his work with Mr A in order for us to consider what, if any, may be the significance of being an older analyst. The material Eike gives us comes from a time when the analyst is aged 83 and his patient is 46. I will begin with a summary of my understanding of this clinical material and then discuss the significance of the lack of “recognition of the inevitability of time and ultimately death” (Money-Kyrle 1971, 443) in this particular analysis, which I suggest lies in the patient and is projected into his analyst. The analyst’s material age is not irrelevant, but I find the part it has played in this analysis and the use to which this patient puts it interesting.

On reading this clinical account I am first struck by two powerful images from the interface of the human and animal worlds, both at the start of Eike’s account and at the start of Mr A’s life. Eike links himself to the old fisherman, Santiago, depicted in Ernest Hemingway’s last novel The Old Man and the Sea, who struggled to capture a marlin and then the precious fish is destroyed by sharks as Santiago is not able to bring the huge marlin safely to shore. Mr A describes his mother lifting a cat, which I take to represent Mr A as a baby, looking as if she were touching “a dead and disgusting object, without any empathy or warmth”. These images from the natural world evoke a fisherman and a mother unable to hold a creature who is different from them, too big or too repugnant. I think this is Mr A’s unconscious phantasy – he is too much for his object, as if he is a different species from those trying to look after him and one with whom they cannot cope. It is this underlying belief about himself that he enacts in his life and in his analysis.

Eike’s account conveys that he feels troubled about his strange patient who he thinks will “get the upper hand” and I think we too, as readers, share this. Mr A talks little in the sessions and seems emotionally froze