This case provides a delicate approach to vital purpose, unconscious pattern, and “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” The author defines, the “paradoxical analytic triangle” to which Pizer refers, as a human quality, an unprecedented level of understanding and comprehension, that lets analyst and patient recognize their own dependence on the object. In so doing, they both gain a quality of presence through recovering the projections that they have attributed to the object.

Four aspects are considered important steps leading to this human quality within the analytic process: dissociation leading to impasse; sensibility opening to countertransference; recollection in tranquillity leading to self-reflexivity; and the patient's “vital purpose”—the most salient aspect (the lighthouse) of the whole project.