On the Patient's Becoming an Individual: The Importance of the Analyst's Personal Response to a Deprived Patient and Her Dreams

Abstract

What patients mainly want—which Ferenczi noted as early as 1932 in his clinical diary and which Bion later expressed in his Cogitations (1992)—and what some patients need, is to experience how the analyst lives and processes the interpersonal events that lie at the origin of their affective and mental suffering. This is especially true with schizoid patients who were profoundly emotionally deprived in childhood. In this paper, the author investigates this crucial aspect of the intersubjective analytic relationship in his treatment of just such a patient, an extremely silent and inert young woman. Through a detailed examination of clinical material from various stages of her analysis, he explores how the analyst's unconscious emotional response serves as both a tool for comprehension and a key element of environmental facilitation—a “new beginning,” to use Balint's phrase—that may help the patient attain a level of development and emancipation that he or she has never experienced before.