The Lady with the Raincoat and the Little Button: The Turning Point of an Analysis—Reflections on Desire, Listening, Resonance, and the Birth of a Mutative Interpretation

The world is for each one what he conceives of it according to his own interior state, and he moves about it in accordance with the vision he has of it.

The first years of analysis

Claire came to see me, sad and distraught, anguished and guilty, on the occasion of a rather unsatisfactory love affair on its decline, into which she had thrown herself out of vexation

and vengeance against her husband who, pressed by her, had confessed and described to her in detail a brief extramarital escapade. Neither the conquest of a lover married to a woman she envied and admired nor her husband's remorse and protestations of love appeased her feeling of disarray and the painful memory of the lady who had been her rival and had thus rendered her husband more desirable. Her drama was the latest in a long history of competition with her intelligent and pretty women friends whom her husband was courting and with whose husbands she was herself in the habit of flirting. She was feeling at the same time a victim of her husband's indelicacy and guilty of having pushed him into it. The lover, brilliant, but unstable and flighty, could provide her with only paltry assistance in attenuating her deep sense of rejection and inferiority.

Moreover, she had always felt devalued and traced its origin back to her very disturbed relationship with her mother, whom she described as a deeply depressed, even melancholic, domineerin