ABSTRACT
My good friend, the Atlanta psychologist Margaret Nichols, has observed that sometimes patients will arrive in her practice and she'll just want "to sit at their feet and learn." This was one such case. I don't necessarily recommend trusting one's spontaneous responses as a general rule, but there are some remarkable people one encounters for whom doing anything else seems wrong.
In previous essays I have described dream figures that appear to compensate for an imbalance in the conscious view. It is as if this patient herself was such a figure for me, calling much of what I thought I knew about trauma and its treatment into question
"Urban Renewal" appeared in the February 2000 Psychiatric Times.
