ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case of Robert. Robert was always deeply concerned, and often worried, about interactions with the members of his family of origin, who remained the most significant people in his day-to-day life. He wanted to know how to ensure that any conflict he could detect between himself and his parents or siblings could be swept under the rug. It is a clinical commonplace that the patient’s verbally expressed memories can be just as thoroughly embedded in an enactment of the transference as any more conventionally defined action. The medicalized, normalizing, instrumental attitude of one strand of the mainstream American psychoanalysis of the past is certainly reminiscent of such a distinction. The basic tenet of that attitude is that one’s interests are best served by making one’s meanings lucid, public, and rational, whereas maintaining meaning as private, unconscious, mysterious, and nonrational is liable to be psychopathological, or at least immature.
