This article presents the author's reactions to a client who saw him for one visit, came 20 minutes late, demanded ideal >parenting,< called during the following two weeks, and one day left flowers in his waiting room. The focus is on the failed meeting, the meeting that did not take place, loss, and longing. The aim is to go beyond diagnostic categories to the place where therapy fails, the edge of what is therapeutically possible. Dwelling with therapeutic incapacity in a full and detailed way – letting >it< speak – may help to stimulate evolution of capacities needed to work with individuals who now slip away from what therapy can do.
A bug-free universe.
(1997)
A basic rhythm of breakdown–recovery, with many offshoots and permutations, characterizes aspects of psychic life. This rhythm threads its way through Elkin's, Winnicott's, and Bion's work and plays an important role in the unconscious processing of affects. If this rhythm is damaged or jammed, affect processing goes awry. Dream work helps initiate affect processing, a kind of emotional digestion. If the dream work's rhythm of breakdown–recovery is damaged, one lives in a state of chronic emotional indigestion or starvation. Clinical work, including a child's dream of the World Trade Center disaster, illustrates the discussion.
The author presents an intense exploration of damage, disappearance, masochism, surrender, control, and faith in a single case. The patient experiences her damaged and disappearing self beyond anything anyone can relate to. She connects to a paper by Emmanuel Ghent that seems to address those more intact than she, yet feels tantalizingly close to his concerns. Ghent's paper refers to her therapist, and through it she peeps into her therapist's soul and the hell of wondering if damage she knows can be shared.