Imperfect Separations

Not long after the birth of her first child, a woman began an analysis. This decision and her maternity resulted from the same wish to recover from the omnipresence of a dead father at the beginning of her adolescence. During her sessions, her constant mentions of her father remained consistently imbued with interminable criticisms that for a long time prevented any possibility of intervention. Through this suffering, which she clung to so strongly, she sought less to diminish her impulses than to maintain her attachment to the paternal imago without any possibility of accepting, for a while, the perspectives of change and separations envisaged in the analysis. She did not accept even the bare outlines of an interpretation, though one day the analyst managed to tell her that she seemed to be waiting for something from him, yet rejected obstinately everything that he was able to say to her. While they were both troubled by the suddenness and strangeness of these words uttered by the analyst, and by the term “mortified” assigned by her transference displacements and those of the analyst to this silent immobilism, she associated to the lively memory of her father and of her fantasy of never having found favour in his eyes in spite of all her efforts to satisfy him. This thought and her reference to the gaze of the other were striking. The analyst took the full measure at this moment of all the expectation and vitality that could sometimes be perceived in her eyes when she arrived for her session.

A few months later, this thought returned in a striking way. She had barely settled down on the couch when she once again asked the analyst if he could tell her the name of a reproduction in the waiting room. Faced with his silence and with the striking images that came to her mind, she said that she had been troubled for a long time by this abstract form that was evocative of her father's gaze. Suddenly, she seemed to be approaching what she was looking for in her analysis aft