You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Perhaps even the most hackneyed cliches and tiresome, stereotyped complaints should not be let fall on analytically deaf ears. For I was rather dismissive in that mode, when the mother of a young woman, about to begin analysis with me, called to explain that, although she was thoroughly familiar with the mental health field and, so, knew not to intrude or interfere, she was intending to pay for her daughter's treatment and, just this once, simply had to satisfy herself, being all too aware of the range of styles of practitioners at large, that I was not the “two-dimensional, cardboard type, who never responds, never makes a sound.” She was quickly and easily satisfied that I was, indeed, human and sufficiently and resoundingly alive; and clinical work with her daughter began.
Many months later, my new patient remarked, late in a session, that I had yet to hear of her mother's appalling childhood, among the most peculiarly cruel imaginable, or so she judged. There was time for only one illustration of this claim: “the piano lessons, at least forty-five minutes a day of forced practicing, starting in fifth grade,