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For what is it that constitutes a “disease entity” or a “new disease”? The physician is concerned not, like the naturalist, with a wide range of different organisms theoretically adapted in an average way to an average environment, but with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances.
-Ivy McKenzie (Sacks, 1987, 6)
There are several questions that I wish to propose and attempt to answer in this paper. The first is a clinical question with both personal and scientific relevance: what is the role that the therapist's disability plays in the development of the patient's transference? In this presentation I will attempt to demonstrate how one particular patient's perception of my disability fits me into a particular transference paradigm, the outcome of which mobilizes a mourning process for his dead father that he was unable to carry out as a child. My disability, for this patient, becomes a template for death and dying. I have become linked in the patient's mind to his dead father via a one-legged uncle who had served as the patient's loving but unsatisfactory father substitute. Within this remobilized mourning process it has been possible for the patient to begin to address oedipal fixations that have interfered with maturation.
What I will be demonstrating, among other things, is how a realistic attribute of the analyst evokes a redintegration of a child-hood