ABSTRACT
The patients make psychotherapists face up to a paradoxical situation: how to remain a patient while allowing development to progress at its own tempo and, at the same time, keeping tension close to the limit. The lack of passion—which, at best, appears dampened, intellectualized, obsessive, or dissociated—is what characterizes latency-age functioning, regardless of the patient's age. The calm and obsessiveness of latency can be disrupted by external events that provoke some curiosity about sexual life, quite different from the scant and lack-lustre genital encounters of their marriages. The lethargy and obsessiveness of latency were shaken after several years when she learned that her best friend was having an extramarital love affair. Further developments in meta-psychological understanding are needed to answer the question about whether there exists an isomorphism between the developmental infant latency and the psychopathology of protracted latency in adult patients.
