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AFTER ABOUT TWO YEARS of his analysis I was listening to a patient who had in the past occasionally made me sleepy. He was talking in an extremely monotonous ruminative way, fitting various aspects of his psyche together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle and bringing in my interpretations as new bits for the puzzle.
The effects on me as his analyst were on this occasion considerable. I began to fall into a dazed state in which I could neither listen nor make any effort of attention. The temptation to surrender to this feeling of inadequacy was strong, but my commitment to analyse my patient enabled me to make the effort to think about my condition. I decided to try out saying that I thought that, perhaps, what he was saying was not what he really felt, but that there was something else he had to communicate that was much more important.
He did not respond at once, but then began to remember that, when his father was trying to show him how to mend his bicycle and later a motor-car, he (the patient) could never understand or grasp what was quite a simple process. His father, exasperated, would say ‘Don't stand there like a stunned gosling’. This patient had had a unique experience of being ‘stuffed’ as an infant and child by two maternal figures who never gave him the chance to experience need, cry for it and succeed in getting it met. They anticipated every wish long after the early weeks of his infancy in a most intruding way. It was likewise later with his father who, in his vain attempts to instruct his son in the practice of fixing things, could only tell him to look at him doing them and never considered letting the son experiment and try out simple operations with his own hands. Later my patient said that it felt to him as if he were being forced to look—and that it seemed like a plank entering his head through his eyes, or like a plank from a lorry entering