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.
FALLING ASLEEP DURING THE ANALYTIC HOUR. Sigmund Gabe, M.D.
A case is reported in which falling asleep during the analytic hours constituted a major transference resistance. A forty-year-old married man sought analysis because of an obsessive fear of death which started in the latency period. When the patient was five, his father became seriously ill and almost died; the illness left him crippled. The father died when the patient was seventeen. A short time later a sister and brother-in-law also died. The patient's first analyst, with whom he was in treatment for a year and a half, died in the course of the analysis.
The patient was conscious of a strong ambivalence toward his father. He attributed his hostile feelings to overhearing primal scenes. Toward his mother he felt only hatred and contempt and openly wished for her death. He was an obstinate and defiant child. A favorite stratagem was to feign fatigue and retire to bed to evade tasks and responsibilities. He would then masturbate and fall asleep.
The initial phase was the analysis of a stubborn compulsive defense. A positive transference developed with an intense homosexual conflict followed by regression. He began to fall asleep during analytic hours and to dream. The dreams indicated that the sleep expressed an oral wish to be reunited with the 'good' mother. The patient then began to manifest intense oral envy. He became depressed, plaintive, filled with self-pity and righteous indignation, as he misconstrued and mismanaged all of his interpersonal relationships. It required considerable analysis to resolve this masochistic defense.
The sleep in this case served multiple purposes: it simultaneously warded off homosexual drives and represented a surrender to them; it inhibited the discharge of aggressive impulses but expressed the fantasied destruction and incorporation of the analyst; it represented a death which assuaged the ego's fear of retribution for destructive wishes against love obj