Case Response I: Geraldine Godsil

Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided.

(Kristeva, 1991, p. 181)

I am grateful to the analyst who provided the material about her work with Chloe and for the way the editors have framed it for comment. I appreciated the editors’ encouragement to adopt a position of reverie in relation to the material. Reverie for me applies both to the willingness to respond to the

emotional experience of the work and also my association to the theoretical terrain and the social and cultural context. I work in London as a Jungian analyst who has explored psychoanalytic ideas and practice in some depth and increasingly benefitted from the relational approaches described by North American analysts’ work (Benjamin, 2004; Atlas & Aron, 2018). Study groups on The Red Book and The Black Books have also been profound influences in recent years.

I found it impossible to immerse myself in reflection on the clinical encounter without exploring the field in which the work is set by the editors. The publication of Lolita in 1955 and then the publication of Lolita in the Afterlife in 2021 by the daughter of the original publisher, Walter Minton, reveals the pain and complexity of human sexual experience and the ambiguity of power in sexual relationships. The cultural changes in the interim which include the #MeToo movement and the exposure and recognition of abuse within institutions provide a framework but the writers of Lolita in the Afterlife and the case of Chloe raise all the questions about why a “girl's very search for belonging” can incline her to be “abducted by the appetite of others.” A lot has changed and nothing has changed. Sexual abuse of young children as we know from our clinical practice is prevalent and recovery precarious, especially if the recovery is about reclaiming a hopeful and passionate link with the body as your own. The body has its own uncanny and unknown areas. Chloe has learned to “do” her gender and sexuality within a particu