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.
After having received Dr. Keable's follow-up (January 1999), I felt the need to reread the initial case presentation as well as the comments I made in reference to it with the thoughtful cooperation of the audience.
Indeed, I found it an interesting experience to have news of a patient who, despite my not knowing him personally, had briefly but intensely occupied my mind more than four years before. The short and unexpected contact between him and his analyst seems to have happily contradicted some possible forebodings of an ominous kind that were based on his tragic history full of traumatic events. These took place throughout his life, producing, as a major effect on him, a precarious sense of identity, a precariousness so extensive that one could detect in him a transsexual potentiality.
Some other characteristics of the patient were much more positive and have already been commented on, such as the importance of the narcissistic cathexis of homosexuality, thanks to the gay movement which allowed the transsexual potentiality to be kept at bay. There was also the important capacity to love (and to be loved), and a confidence in the analysis as preventing destruction. It seemed useful at this point to assess once more certain aspects of the clinical material. Indeed, rereading the material indicated that the central issue is the patient's identity. In a way, the three symptoms quoted by Dr. Keable at the beginning of her presentation might be considered as having all to do with a problem of identity: he has “the wrong ID” (the idea that he is an impostor who will be shown up), he has a poor memory, he suffers from social anxiety linked to a day-dream that an older man approaches him but he is not intelligent and handsome enough to please that man. The poor memory might result from the fact that he cannot reconstruct his own history in a