“In the Beginning is My End”: The Initial Analytical Meeting from the Patient's Perspective

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered (T.S. Eliot, East Cocker)

Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness. (Edward Said, Beginnings)

I had no idea of how I had arrived at the entrance of the old Parisian hotel that was situated on a narrow street in a busy district of the city. I entered the rundown hotel and saw a clerk seated behind a dusty old counter. He waved his hand at me in the direction of the elevator with an air of boredom. I proceeded to enter a very narrow space that resembled a cupboard, fitted with dark wooden panels, a mirror, and a bare light bulb overhead that cast an unflattering illumination. After closing the stiff iron grid gate and then the wooden doors with glass panels, I pressed a stiff button that responded jerkily to my touch and made me reflexively aware that I was the agent of the action that had caused the elevator to jolt upward. There was something incongruous about being ushered upwards by the suggestive sound of the elevator's mechanism and yet not being able to see where it was heading; I felt slightly apprehensive at the possibility of being stuck midway between floors and being alone in the