Comments on Coline Covington's ‘Opening the mind to reality’

First of all I would like to thank the organizers of the conference, as well as Coline Covington herself, for the opportunity offered me to discuss such an interesting and stimulating paper.

I was surprised to find out, upon reading this paper, how clear and understandable it was to me although coming from a colleague belonging to a different theoretical framework. In fact, I realized that the similarities were greater than the differences I might have expected. Coline Covington mentions that she is a Jungian by origin, while I can say that I found her to be a Freudian, clinically speaking.

In this paper, the patient Adam is described as suffering from a persecutory internal object characterized by the author as an unconscious pathological super-ego that makes him unable to establish loving relationships with others and turns him into a prisoner of himself. The origin of this dynamic situation seems to be related, according to the author, to previous experiences the patient had with his mother.

This whole situation was repeated in the transference relationship with Coline Covington, when she often becomes the hated object, useless to him in the sessions. I quote the author: ‘I thought he was conveying to me his experience of an external reality from the past, which he was continuing to repeat and re-experience in the present’ (p. 23).

Although I agree with most of the aspects Coline Covington brings up and admire the way she was able to work clinically with this patient, I will try to look at the material she presented from a different angle, that is, from my Kleinian-Bionian perspective, in order to establish some connections and make some comments. I understand this to be my function here.

1. The first point I would like to bring up is related to the sentence quoted above (p. 23). Coline Covington refers to Adam's symptoms as linked to experiences with external reality from the past, repeated and re-experienced in the transference with her.