Paradoxical Thought

Before the patient could get down to writing his graduation thesis, he had to trace out his future and choose between the legal profession and his passion for fencing: it had always been like that, for as long as he could remember. He then described the obsessional world in which he was trapped: his constant ruminating, the hesitations that made him weigh up the pros and cons of any situation indefinitely. Likewise, how could he find a way to combine his activity as a high-level fencer with his legal career? The conflict that had been partially avoided up until then seemed insoluble this time. Rumination became a feature of the sessions. The analyst was gradually feeling caught in the trap of this binary and deadly world. As for the patient, his associations and dreams became increasingly rare, while his defences became more rigid; to the point even that the analyst sometimes spent whole sessions wondering inwardly what choice her patient should make, letting herself get caught up in a game that immobilised her own associative capacities and keeping her stuck to the literal nature of the discourse. There was then an alternation between moments of “collage” and moments when, in order to escape this situation, the analyst began thinking about something else, but always very concrete things. The field of the session dried up, turned into a desert.

It was in this context that the appearance of a paradoxical thought in the analyst would permit the resumption of a work of working through. As, once again, the patient talked about his thesis that wasn't advancing, and her doubts, the analyst suddenly stopped listening to him and let herself enter into a curious, and even frightening feeling, namely, the almost physical sensation of another presence in the room. The word that came to her mind to describe what she had perceived was “ectoplasm”. This paradoxical thought occurred to her without being induced by any conscious association; it seemed foreign to the analyst who did