Chapter 4 The Dynamics of Reassurance

In an analytic session a patient spoke about an incident from his childhood. He had once bought his mother a tub of ice-cream for her birthday. He had chosen his favourite kind. When he gave it to her, she said that she supposed he expected her to give him some. The patient reported that he had felt deeply wounded by her response. He saw it as an example of the way that she never wholeheartedly welcomed what he did for her, and always distrusted his motives.

This story, or some variation of it, had come up a number of times in the analysis. As on these other occasions, my patient portrayed himself as simply offering something good to his mother – the kind of ice-cream that he liked best – only to have his motives suspected by a critical and distrustful figure. It was understandable that he was wounded by the incident. Listening to his description of this episode from the past, I thought it also carried a reference to the situation between the two of us: he wanted to make the point that he often felt similarly misjudged and hurt in the analysis, confronted by my equally inappropriate suspicions of his motives.

In the session to which I am referring, I commented that not only was he describing an upsetting episode that had taken place, but also he needed to emphasize how hurtful it was when his benign motives were mistrusted and misjudged by his mother in the past, and by myself in the analysis. He responded to my comment as if it had merely confirmed for him that I too was unsympathetic, distrustful, and not on his side. He protested in a hurt and angry way, and then withdrew into silence. This response was familiar, and I had a strong impression that it had a curiously comforting quality for the patient. It seemed to me that he now felt under no pressure to think, or to examine what his role as well as mine had been. He had settled instead

into adopting a picture of himself as a child who had been mistreated by a parent or analyst who ought to feel clumsy and guilty