Case Response II

The case write-up of Kate begins with intensity and drama. We are immediately brought into the tension of archetypal opposites, life and death. Even the two poles of victim/perpetrator and prey/predator are constellated. The analyst has done a beautiful job of bringing the reader to the heart of the matter from the beginning and into the centre of the analysand's activated negative parental complexes. Kate presents as flooded from the start, in a state of ego inflation where the ego is undifferentiated from archetypal aspects of the Self. Kate, in turn, then floods her new analyst with fear by revealing the rupture with her previous therapist. The previous therapist was an unfortunate symbolic casualty, a needed precursor to the symbolic death of the internalized negative mother. Kate was desperate for an other that could bear this intensity, this heat, so she could begin to mediate and tolerate the raw affects of terror, rage and shame within herself.

The potential value in investigating the failed connection with her analyst more thoroughly would have offered an opportunity to explore the rupture as an external representation of an intra-psychic dilemma within Kate. At the time of analysis with her previous therapist, Kate seemed to be attempting to discharge this internal tension by playing it out in the transference. She was, and continued to be early in the analytic process, unable to hold the tensions between life and death, victim or prey and perpetrator, and swung from one pole to the other. In the initial interaction with the analyst, the subtext and implicit question from Kate seemed to be, “Am I too much for you? Can you handle my process?”, which can be interpreted as an inner question with her deeper greater self being projected onto the other. She was testing. The new analyst's capacity to hold the countertransference seems to be “good enough,” using the analyst's own reference to Winnicott's theory here, to allow the process and the work of individuati