Discussion I

I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Libbey for her excellent narrative of a first-rate piece of analytic work. I took great pleasure in reading this case report.

While I was engaged in sorting out what I might write in response to Dr. Libbey's presentations, an analysand of mine, who is an advanced candidate in psychoanalytic training, had read the announcement for this meeting and said that she had the fantasy of helping me write this discussion. When I asked her what she had in mind, she said, “I would like to help you talk about the wisdom of resistances.” My patient was referring to how her own resistances had shielded her for a time from the emotional upheavals to which she became increasingly susceptible as she entered more deeply into the analytic process. She has concluded, and fairly I think, that are there phases during which analysis can be so destabilizing as to be truly endangering for the patient.

I want to discuss Jean's resistances from the perspective of their possible meaning and function as security operations. I shall begin by presenting my reading of the case material with regard to how certain of the vulnerabilities that Jean brought with her to analysis interacted with certain features of the analytic situation to produce a sense of endangerment.

In the first of the sessions reported by Dr. Libbey—from late in the first year—it is apparent that Jean finds the analytic situation anything but soothing. She experiences therapy as being overly taxing to her emotional resources. This is brought out in response to Dr. Libbey's suggestion that she increase the frequency of her sessions to three times a week. The suggestion frightens her. She says, “Something must be really wrong to have to come that often.”

Her objections to asking her parents for money, to not having