The Chimera

This patient needed several years to settle into a stable setting; at the beginning, it had been intolerable for her and she had attacked it constantly. Today, she freely invests interest in her sessions and engages in them, whereas the dominating theme of her entire life up until now has been one of non-engagement. But nothing is acquired once and for all and this analysis is still in “danger” of being broken off. This session was the last before the analyst was due to be absent for a week, an absence that had been announced a month before, during which the patient had planned to make a trip with a girlfriend.

She arrived feeling “encumbered”: she had not felt like coming and did not feel like going away with her friend either. She came with a heavy heart, just like when she had to go to school as a little girl. Her associations revolved around the fear of being disappointed by her loved ones, in her relationships, in her undertakings, and of “making a bad choice”. A girlfriend of hers, who was pregnant, had returned to live with her with only a few euros per month to live on (the price of the patient's analysis); she thought this was a very bad choice. The session was rather laborious; she did not talk much and stopped in the middle of sentences. The analyst had the feeling that the patient was censoring herself constantly, and began to feel a bit discouraged. At the same time, she told herself that the patient was once again on the point of losing interest in the analysis and of stopping. During a silence, the analyst was wondering about the pertinence of the analysis for her, and about its pertinence in general. She had the depressing thought it was perhaps all a vast sham, and the distressing feeling of not having access to what would give or restore meaning.

Suddenly, an image of flying heads crossed her mind, like in a ball game. The analyst recognised a dream she had recounted to her own analyst more than 10 years before, which he had commented on by saying: “