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Understanding this case analytically is complicated by a number of factors.
First: The presentation is “heavily disguised” in order to protect the identity of the patient. What has been disguised we do not know, so that suppositions dependent on the patient's occupation and background are highly speculative.
Second: The patient underwent twenty-eight months of “psychotherapy” before beginning analysis with the same therapist. It is uncertain how this influenced the development of the transference.
Third: A number of details about the patient's religious beliefs as described; in the protocol seemed bizarre until they were clarified in the discussion, e.g., that masturbation was equivalent to murder (!), that not carrying a handbag, on the sabbath was “as bad as murder,” etc. This sounds more like James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than a formerly religious, now secular Jew. Dr: Rosbrow-Reich explained that these were childhood, not adult beliefs. Still, they struck me as peculiar, as did “Prayers over chocolate and banana!”
Fourth: It was difficult to understand the patient's calling his father “bad and awful” (a single statement); other references in the protocol are to loving acts by the father, such as the gift of a red fire engine, tender care when the patient was ill, etc. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense.
Fifth: On the couch the patient “visualized a colorful image of peas and carrots, which his mother had fed him when he was little, interrupted by an image of an erect penis. At the next hour, “he told me that yesterday when he entered the room, he noticed that I was attractive.” How are we to understand this? Why so banal a choice of food? Why not, at one extreme, a nursing bottle, or at the other, caviar and champagne? I could not avoid the speculation that he is mocking his analyst, playing with a fantasy of what the analyst would
like to hear. I had a similar impression of his associations to the “fire” dream described in the process