Follow-up to Hartmann Seminar: The Case of Ms. R

Three years have passed since Dr. Solnit heard the case of Ms. R. She has continued in four times a week analysis, without significant interruption. She has remained unmarried while her career, as predicted by Dr. Solnit, has continued to advance. She ended her relationship with T, ostensibly because of his continued unemployment, but also as his emotional commitment to her deepened (and he wanted to have a baby with her).

Subsequent experience has borne out the wisdom of Dr. Solnit's conjecture that I was using genetic reconstructions as a resistance to the present: my abating insistence on genetic formulations (likely reflecting my own analytic progress and lessening anxiety) allowed the sadomasochistic elements of the patient's transference to blossom. It was increasingly clear that Ms. R seemed to experience the analysis at the height of her sadomasochistic transference via two modes of identification: one reflecting her mother as the volatile, envious, and hysterical one “left to deal with the mess left behind” by father, and who mounted quasi-paranoid attacks on the analysis-marriage; the other reflecting her father, whose tools of sabotage of the analysis-marriage were withdrawal, depression, and alcoholism. I withheld articulating such genetic connections, however, in favor of persistently interpreting in the transference her victimized stance as a defense against her sadistic wishes and consequent guilt (and of its dramatizations, e.g., her multiple threats of walking out and quitting, diatribes reminiscent of adolescent storms, etc.). This has yielded a broadening capacity to observe herself, a lessening in repression of her childhood memories (especially those reflective of both the persistence of trouble in her parents' marriage and the significance of