ABSTRACT
Rick, a composite of several clients we have known, is feeling angry, frightened and immobilized. He has been in therapy for four months with Dominique and is beginning to voice painful longings and deep, inchoate fears. Rick is a single, 32-year-old computer engineer whose hard work and discipline have won him great professional success but this has done nothing to assuage growing feelings of emptiness, loneliness and depression. A lonely man, he wants more connection with others and the joys of sex and romance but his sporadic attempts in this direction always end in an almost physiological paralysis.
