The Enigmatic Message

A young woman has been coming to talk for a few years. She often speaks about her intellectual and emotional journey with a constant air of astonishment at having succeeded so well. Each time she has success, she changes direction. For example, she completed her thesis but no sooner had she obtained it than she immediately turned her interests to quite another domain. When her analysis began, moreover, she was in the process of making a new conversion towards a plastic arts activity that interested her intensely. Remarkably, each of these changes constituted a definitive break, without further ado; the same was true in her emotional life which was marked by a succession of sudden and deliberate separations that even sometimes involved having an abortion. Each was followed by an immediate displacement towards other investments as if no working-through were possible, as if no experience could leave any traces. She then brought a dream: “The space of the session was transformed, the couch was in a different position and was stained with blood. The analyst then rushed towards the window, and opened it. The patient was afraid he might fall. In a further sequence, a surgeon explained that the act that he had just carried out could not be reimbursed by health insurance…as was the case here!” The patient associated quickly to a 2011 film by Pedro Almodóvar called The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) in which, after multiple surgical interventions, a surgeon transforms a man into a woman with an ideal body. After a moment of silence, she added: “There is no treatment form here either, and I am becoming a woman; I come here to become a woman again.” Becoming a woman again? The analyst took up this formulation whose impact made him listen more closely. Was he to see it as a new version of Freud's hypothesis according to which, on entering the phallic stage, “the little girl is a little man”? Or, alternatively, as a transference manifestation that had pushed the patient hith