Searching for Love and Expecting Rejection: Implicit and Explicit Dimensions in Cocreating Analytic Change

I knew Something Was Wrong When Natalie Came into My Office. On these occasions, she barely looked at me; her thin face was drawn tight, losing its usual attractiveness. Body movements and aura were anxiety-laden and constricted. This particular day, I internally prepared myself first to withstand, and then to understand, her massively painful upset— what I anticipated to be an admixture of traumatic hurt, intense shame, covert anger, and her deflating conviction that I did not love her. Rapidly, I searched my mind as to what might have happened since our last session or what might I have done in the previous session that could have activated her sense that I preferred someone else over her, that I loved someone else more than her, excluding, as she had made clear, my wife and family.

Over the past 8 years of analysis, beginning when she was about to turn 44, Natalie and I had become all too familiar with these hair-triggered painful