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A young woman who had been seduced by an adult as a child of five showed a typical and repetitive simultaneous shutting off of emotion and perception in a "hypnoid state" and a hypersensitive awareness to certain signals that meant to her the possible reliving of a trauma from childhood.
She reported one day that she had left the previous analytic session feeling sleepy and "out of things." This was a characteristic autohypnotic state: "I didn't even know how to open the door or whether to leave it open; it was as if I wasn't quite there, and I had no awareness of you or of leaving your office. And yet when I went out into the waiting room, I heard the sound of a man urinating from the bathroom. I am sure it was a man—from the sound. And before that, as I was closing the door, you had a phone call and I heard the change in your voice. You weren't talking to a patient, but to someone you didn't want to hear from."
The patient, as usual, was right. As she had done before, she was showing a need both to block out and to anticipate what was going to happen to her. My next patient, a man, had reported that he had urinated before coming in to his session. I had received a telephone call from an insurance salesman, and although the young woman had only heard me say "hello" and "no," I had not welcomed the call. Despite the patient's alteration of consciousness, her perceptions had been accurate and had registered almost instantaneously.
As a child of five, she had been seduced to perform fellatio after she had opened a bathroom door on a man who was urinating. His anger at the intruder ("someone you didn't want to hear from") turned to sexual excitement, and he started to masturbate. The girl especially remembered the sound of his