Chapter 9 ‘I was Thinking …’

The traditional English fairy story begins, ‘Once upon a time …’. This has a reassuring familiarity about it. It allows for the exploration of a range of fundamental desires and conflicts, locating the events to be described at an indefinite time, and (usually) an indefinite place. The child is reassured that the wicked stepmother, the cruel father, the wicked witch are not too closely related to an actual mother, father or sibling, and certainly not to the person telling the story. There is also the implied promise that the story will end with the baddies punished or destroyed, and the good figures living happily ever after.

In analysis, patients not infrequently begin a session saying, ‘I was thinking’, or some variation of this. This is an account of a process, described as ‘thinking’, that occurs at a time and in a place different from the one in which patients find themselves, at that moment with the analyst. It raises the question of the nature of the relationship between the person now in the room and the person who was thus introduced to the analyst. How near or distant is the person who is speaking to the thoughts, experiences and feelings to which he or she is alluding? How is the analyst being located in relation both to the speaker and to what he or she is conjuring up? I want to explore the functions it serves for patients to maintain this narrative mode, which distances them from the immediate impact of the encounter and allows them to function as a guide or commentator, inviting the analyst to pay attention, to witness something that will provoke various responses in the analyst – interest, sympathy, admiration, criticism or disturbance.

As I hope to illustrate, this way of ‘managing’ the initial encounter and the first part of the session represents the patient’s attempts to deal

with intense, often quite primitive emotions evoked by the immediate contact with the analyst, into whom powerful archaic phantasies are projected. Such contact may evoke e