Case Response I

In the middle of the night the phone on the analyst's nightstand lights up, vibrating insistently. The caller is agitated. She floods the analyst's bedroom with panic—there is shattered glass, blood and stitches. What is going on? The analyst learns that this woman's daughter Bianca, on a gap year in a Latin American country, has had her drink spiked. Out of control, she fell, crashing into a glass door. The stitched cuts that mark her skin bear witness, but no memory of the accident remains.

Having anticipated that the call would bring bad news, the analyst realizes this is what she terms a referral. How often are analysts shocked out of sleep

to receive a referral? By the time the phone call ends, the analyst's irritation has subsided. Instead, there is curiosity and a sense of adventure. She identifies with Bianca, remembering how, at her age, she too took a gap year, in part to liberate herself from what she experienced as an “oppressive regime”. Liberation surely includes throwing off unquestioning compliance with societal and domestic power structures which also offer security, comfort and care: however, the analyst agrees to do what the mother wants. The mother gets her way.

Bianca is missing from these discussions and yet light has entered the darkness of this young woman's internal situation. With her mother as conduit, Bianca's psychological contents have found a container. In feeling for or feeling into this young woman (forms of projective identification), the analyst is taking in her prospective patient. Rosemary Gordon quotes Jung's definition of “feeling into”:

The objectification of my quality into an object, distinct from myself, whether the quality objectified merits the term “feeling” or not … it conveys through the agency of feeling an essential psychic content into the object, whereby the object is introjected. (Gordon, 1993, p. 231)

Gordon adds, “in this context the process is far from pathological, and is in fact an important agent in the esta