You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Bruno sat across from me in tears, one of the first times he had cried after years of sessions. He had just conveyed a story told to him by an elderly nursing home resident who described retrieving the bodies of his fellow soldiers from tanks after battles in WWII. In one tank, there weren't bodies to be found, only parts sprayed on the interior walls. Through his sobs, Bruno asked, «How do you live with that? What do you do with that kind of thing?» I shuddered with my own image of this gruesome discovery, recognizing that we were both living an immediate transmission of something beyond the words in this old soldier's recounting of a horror from so long ago. Of course, Bruno has his own horrors beyond words, abused by his sadistic military father where unwanted caresses turned to beatings and back again, his body both desired and debased.
In the moments after this story, I had an image of something I assumed was a memory. Bruno was lying on my analytic couch. With his balding head quite close to mine, I was feeling the tender intimacy of this scene. As I reflected back, I wondered if he would ever use the couch again. Bruno said that he knew the old soldier's story was a way of talking about parts of his own shattered past, that his comfort in working at the nursing home was connected to working on his own