Case Material: Leah

When early attachment disruption in the analysand becomes comingled with unconscious possession in the analyst, the work in the intersubjective space may become fraught with implicit demands upon the analyst's psyche for a mutual analysis to take place. Here the analyst must not only take in the analysand's non-metabolized psychic content, but the analyst must tolerate their own non-metabolized psychic content being taken in by the analysand, thus allowing a transformation into consciousness for both. This may constitute Jung's ‘demand for the analysis of the analyst’. In his essay Problems of Modern Psychotherapy Jung wrote:

What does this demand mean? Nothing less than that the doctor is as much ‘in the analysis’ as the patient. He is equally a part of the psychic process of treatment and therefore equally exposed to the transforming influences. Indeed, to the extent that the doctor shows himself impervious to this influence, he forfeits influence over the patient; and if he is influenced only unconsciously, there is a gap in his field of consciousness which makes it impossible for him to see the patient in true perspective.

Constance Romero & Carolyn Bates

Four pounds. 1946. We were several years into her analysis before Leah told me she had been born prematurely. Early questions about her infancy had yielded a story of her relational beginnings, a story of her parents, but nothing about her actual birth, and no stories about her physical body. Her mother had become pregnant with her out of wedlock, after meeting a handsome sergeant while working as a secretary on a military base. Leah would find evidence of her birth father via ancestry.com only in her 70s, relying on a single clue: a black- and-white photograph of herself as an infant, her mother and a man she

never recalled meeting, their names penciled on the back, her last name not reflecting his.

It was a different man, whom she met when she was four