Chapter 4 Dead Mother, Dead Child

Antonio worked as an engineer for a construction company for about two years, but left some six months before beginning analysis. He complained that he did not comprehend why he acted in the ways that he did. He told me that he had found the construction company very challenging and thought he had done quite well there, but there were problems. He paused for some minutes, seemingly in contemplation, before resuming his account. He said that it had been ‘interesting’ how he had gone through a sort of crisis with his boss: he initially quite liked him, but then he believed his boss had been less than thrilled with him.

His boss had thought him unusually promising and they got off to a very good start. He was handed important projects, but then found himself disagreeing with one of the other project managers. Eventually it became clear that he withdrew into a kind of sulk in the presence of his boss and colleagues, but his employer, a hearty, well-intentioned family man, wasn’t going to be deterred by his new employee’s odd behaviour, and confronted him continuously over several months. Antonio thought he was always on the verge of the sack, but, as his boss informed him, although it seemed as if that was exactly what he wanted, he, the boss, was not going to accommodate him. This led to a quite profound breakthrough in which Antonio rediscovered his sense of initiative, came out of his sulk, idealised his employer, and was very content—in fact happier at work than he had ever been.

As he told me the details of this story and the tale unfolded and deepened, he gradually became less communicative. It felt like a resistance of a peculiar kind, as if he had suddenly been overcome by something. When I drew attention to anything he said, or to his silences, it lit him up and drove him to further speech; smiling, as if awakened from some distracting sleep, he would suddenly tell me in much greater detail what he had intended to discuss.

I commented on the moments when he began