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Paolo has shared a moving account of the 8-year analysis of Veronica, which went remarkably well. One sees, by the end, significant gains for this very disturbed and dysfunctional young woman who, at the age of 30, dared yet again to risk repeating the traumatic relational events of her life in what must have been a faint hope for a new beginning. His vivid descriptions of some of the excruciating events of Veronica’s life, including her previous failed attempts at group and individual psychoanalytic therapy, allow readers to enter into the helpful relationship they established, despite the difficulties between them, through the years they spent working together. Paulo’s rich account permits readers to witness the almost impossible problems that a traumatized person can bring to the analytic relationship, struggling as they do to stay at times intact, at times fragmented and at times, some combination of both.
From the outset, Paulo saw Veronica as “a frightened person with little control over her feelings” and noted that her affect was often disconnected from the painful experiences she was describing; “she would speak in a particular tone of voice, which contrasted with the description of her unease” (p. 280). In other words, her simulated serenity masked her dissociated turmoil and despair.
I agree with Paulo’s formulation of Veronica’s difficulties in terms of self-regulatory problems associated with her tendency to dissociate from those parts of her self that, for various reasons, had been rendered unacceptable in many relational contexts. From the beginning, it seems clear that her anguished and injured self states might be among those unacceptable areas of her subjective world. Her profoundly limited, and therefore ineffective, access to her own emotional pain renders her an extremely vulnerable person who found herself constantly in grossly unsuitable, even harmful, relationships. Conceptually, one might say that competent aversiveness is fundamental to compet