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When a subject is highly controversial … one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give One's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf
Rarely have I had such mixed thoughts and feelings while reading an account of a clinical treatment. On one hand, I felt very pleased and eager to be meeting this particular patient within the often-dusty pages of psychoanalytic journals. This particular patient—Chris, a poor, African American, institutionalized young man, to describe his demographic—is the kind of patient I don't think many of us have worked with, considered so deeply, or taken the time to write about. The kind of person many of us may not even ever encounter, period. To hear his story so boldly and carefully told, felt important to me, like bringing an invisible person out from the shadows and into the light. Sapountzis entered this treatment so imaginatively, alert to creating bridges, silences, overlapping worlds, languages, rhythms and metaphors. His description of the treatment is indeed poetic and vividly conjured: I can just see the two of them sitting under the gigantic oak tree and can hear their call and response. Sapountzis brought great wisdom to the treatment by acknowledging Chris's hopelessness through Cavafy's words: “There is no ship for you, there is no road …,” thereby creating a paradoxical space for Chris to find glimmers of his own hope.
At the same time, I had an uneasy sense that a subtle enactment was occurring whereby Chris was being “cultivated” in certain ways by Sapountzis so that he could be seen in a more recognizable way. Here was