Challenge, Apraxia, and Avoidance

Aman in his late 30s, in the eighth year of an analysis undertaken because of paralyzing difficulties in love and work that had driven him to despair, managed at long last to fall in love for the first time. Contrary to his invariable habit in relation to the countless women he had discarded in a career of Don Juanism, he was not preoccupied with listing the alleged shortcomings of his inamorata's status or prestige. In fact, he was almost craven in his tolerance of her initial lack of commitment to their relationship, and he refrained entirely from raising objections to her behavior and preferences, although he often found these rather difficult to bear. Only certain dreams of vengeance on a woman (in the manifest content, this was sometimes explicitly his mother) — especially revenge by means of sexual infidelities — betrayed the fact that he was enraged by these deprivations and once again on the verge of lapsing into the guerrilla warfare that had characterized his dealings with his parents for over three decades.

In these circumstances, I predicted a rupture of this important relationship — the first contingency to have relieved the patient's chronic depressive mood — unless he could make his needs clear to his beloved and gain her cooperation in mitigating his dissatisfactions. Although he was in complete agreement with this pessimistic forecast, the patient could not mobilize himself to discuss these