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First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Libbey for her wonderful presentation. It is obviously the product of much sensitive understanding and hard work. Beyond praising the report, however, it must also be said that, despite its inclusion of process notes, the presentation for the most part situates us at a relatively great distance from detailed discussion of technique. It puts us instead relatively close to a case history analysis. This is not said in criticism, for every report is a narrative and every narrative necessarily controls its readers to some extent. Consequently, every narrative has its pros and cons. Some narratives, such as Gill's (Gill, ; Gill and Hoffman, ), for example, tend to limit us to seeing the trees and not the forest; they do so by focusing on sentence-by-sentence interactions and commentaries.
Dr. Libbey's narrative synthesizes much material gathered at many different phases of her work. Consequently, a discussant who is trying to get a sense of the evolution of the relationship and of the tensions built into it—such tensions being part of every therapeutic relationship—must make many inferences and so is in constant danger of being in error.
One must also bear in mind that more than one discussion of, or secondary narrative about, a report can always be developed; this is so even within one theoretical framework and even by one discussant. My framework, I should say, is broadly Freudian, which means that it is also somewhat Kleinian or object-relational, interpersonal, and self-psychological.
And now for the case report as I read it and retell it. At the center of this narrative is some kind of extreme symbiotic relationship between a daughter and an invasive and controlling mother. This being so, the patient may be expected from the word go to be