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Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
A thirty-year-old woman with severe phobic relations was the impetus for this inquiry. During the course of analysis she became discontented with early morning appointments which she herself had originally requested. After a great deal of hesitation, she revealed that she had anxiety about being the first patient whom I saw in the morning. At the risk of offending me, she stated that she was fearful of a man's mood that early in the morning. For many weeks she watched the way I would greet her and the way I would generally conduct myself in preparation for the day in order to gain clues about my state of mind, grumpiness, irritability, etc. She felt that seeing me this early made her particularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes and vagaries of my private life. She might be the brunt of a quarrel I had with my wife, or of possibly being up all night with a sick child, or of having had a bad cup of coffee in the morning. “There are some people,” she remarked, “who are really not human until mid-day.”
My first impulse, of course, was to holler “foul”—resistance! After some soul-searching I discovered that it was true that I was grumpy and that she was resisting. She had “conveniently” had a father who was a martinet in the morning. He suffered chronically from ulcers and would awaken with a sour disposition. She was warned by her mother not to be around him when father awakened. “Don't be the first one he meets.”
In everyday life one hears expressions concerning the first encounter. It is found in a situation of extreme anger. “I am so angry I will kill the first person or animal I see!” Or, one finds it as a