You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
No; if I mistakeIn these foundations which I build upon,The centre is not big enough to bearA schoolboy’s top.Leontes in The Winter’s Tale
A patient dreamt: ‘I was walking down Mrs Jones’s road; I stopped in front of her window, to look at my reflection in the glass. As I looked at myself reflected there, I suddenly realised that I could see her inside, looking at me, and she was pointing at me, trying to say something, which I could not understand. I then went down some steps to look through the basement window. Mrs Jones was there, dressed in a sexy dressing gown, and I could see that she was going to make love with her neighbour, Barry. In the dream, I was surprised, since Barry is twenty years younger than she. Later I thought, but in the dream she was also young.’
I want to use this dream, very schematically, as an illustration of the patient’s three positions in relation to his object:
The glass used as mirror represents the phantasy that when he looks into his analyst’s eyes, all that he sees is himself: he has the illusion that he occupies the analyst’s mind entirely; this is opacity transformed into an illusory transparency.
The analyst shatters this illusion by having an existence inside her own mind, by being three-dimensional; and her thoughts, which in
the dream he cannot (and, partly, would rather not) understand also communicate the reality of separateness.
He is intruding into, and being intruded upon by, the primal scene, both because the analyst’s thoughts represent a third object with whom she has a mental intercourse, but also as a defence against being excluded by all that is hidden from him when he is in her presence; in the child’s fantasy, if a primal scene exists, then he wants to be right inside it — the confusion as to generations attests to that.