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Recent authors have focused on the relevance of understanding that an important aspect of the analytic relationship involves the recognition and negotiation of those interpersonally conflicting selfobject needs that involve patient and analyst. It is the analyst's empathic understanding of the patient's selfobject needs and transferences, while they are engaged in such a conflict, that allows room for flexibility during such negotiations. However, such attunement may be difficult for an analyst with intensified selfobject needs of his own, that he requires the patient to meet in a prescribed manner. If an impasse develops, productive self-analysis may resolve it and eventually encourage processes of self-growth and change for both parties in the relationship. More specifically, at times of reaction to personal loss, the sense of urgency one or both parties feel within themselves, related to areas of previously unmet need, may intensify. In the relationship, an open struggle might ensue, often in previously more hidden, but established, areas of need conflict. My case illustrates how a crisis of this type was able to facilitate important gains in the analytic relationship. This was because of my eventual understanding of the determinants of my selfobject needs in the way they applied to this patient.
My first analytic control case was of an Asian woman in her mid-twenties who presented symptomatically with chronic depressive feelings that resulted in generalized social withdrawal, particular fears of heterosexual intimacy, and ongoing academic and occupational underachievement since leaving high school. Third in a sibline of three, she experienced