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.
At the beginning of treatment, the patient, whom I will refer to as P,1 was 28 years old, had been married for several years, and was the mother of a young son. She had just terminated a previous psychoanalysis of three years duration with a different analyst that had initially helped to bring about some order in her life by curtailing the use of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous behavior. However, during the last year of that analysis, P had become increasingly depressed. Her depressive episodes seemed to be precipitated by the sessions themselves, dissipating between sessions, but extending in duration until finally depression became a chronic state. The most salient problematic theme in regard to this former analysis which emerged in our initial consultation was that P needed desperately and apparently frequently requested, if not demanded, to know that her analyst “cared” about her. The analyst was allegedly stalwart in not responding. In response to P's relentless insistence, the analyst reportedly resorted to the interpretation that an open expression of caring on her part would be of no help to her, intimating that P would not believe her. Experiencing this interpretation as yet another evasive maneuver, P angrily retorted that the analyst was a “walking corpse.” This episode appeared to epitomize the therapeutic impasse that led to the termination of treatment.