Discutant

Let me begin first of all by thanking the organisers and the scientific committee of this conference for the opportunity of being together with you today and introducing the discussion of Mme Athanassiou-Popesco's beautiful and important paper. We have been privileged to hear a presentation in which a gripping clinical narrative is combined with profound theoretical reflection, a combination that we have become used to encountering in her other papers and books. These address a wide variety of topics, but all of them, like the paper we have just heard, concern processes that are profoundly important to our existence as human beings.

I wish to leave enough time for contributions from the floor, and I shall not even attempt a full response to the many points of interest raised in this paper. My aim will be to highlight a few issues that may serve as a point of departure for more general discussion. I shall begin with the clinical illustration and some of the technical issues arising out of it, and then move on to some theoretical points.

The first question I want to raise concerns the initial two years of treatment, during which Mme Simon's hands and Gaspard's shared the fluid bath of the sink. That seems to have been a necessary foundation for later developments: as though Gaspard needed to experience that kind of receptivity before the hard metal boundaries that gave him a mal de tete could begin to feel like helpful firmness rather than the proverbial brick wall. Clearly Mme A-P and Annick Simon did a great deal of work during this phase, and presumably gave much attention to Annick's countertransference experience of despair and hope. I would guess that it was this work that made a watery, fluid world into something meaningful: even when Gaspard was tempted to slip into unthinking two-dimensionality, Annick would have carried on observing, monitoring her emotions, thinking about her response as well as acting on intuition. His use of the water could have been two-di