Case Response I

To comment on our colleague's delicate case is at once alarming and a very great privilege. Our colleague is graciously allowing us to enter a space we all know so well and consider to be both private and sacred. As colleagues, we have been given permission to see through a particular lens with a particular perspective. We cannot see the whole picture, but we can read the words of our colleague. Just how these words translate in the atmosphere in our colleague's studio we cannot know, but we can imagine. Nor can we feel this patient's physical presence in the room, hear his silences, or the manner in which he breathes at moments of greatest intensity: important markers all. By looking on from this distance we can identify some of the complexities embedded in this heart-rending story.

That such a story no longer feels out of the ordinary - I refer only to a story and not the person to whom it belongs - tells us a great deal about the many social and cultural upheavals and indeed tragedies that confront us in our consulting rooms today. It also informs us of the many changes to our psychological work, for we are now examining and analysing not just the conscious and unconscious aspects of a single individual, but the social and political upheavals of this century and the last. This material feels more than transgenerational and trans-historical in nature, however valuable these concepts are. It is as though a vast slice of history accompanies this patient into the clinic and this history has been lodged into an aspect of his psyche and psychological attitude. How much does our national history speak through an individual, or even try to be liberated through an individual?

I bring to this privileged position what we might call a straightforward Jungian training, with early roots in a classical tradition which led me to become more developmental. Over the years my perspective has changed quite radically so that now I draw on a number of theoretical frameworks as well as o