ABSTRACT
In March 2003 and for the next three months, I went through the worst experience of my life following an operation to replace an aortic valve. Although a successful operation, it was followed by a profound and bewildering regression such as I had never experienced before. I offer this account of my experience because I believe that what went on in my mind deserves as much attention as that which my body received. Both were involved in recovery. Two things make this account individual: my personality structure, which was tested by this onslaught, and my experience of a good analysis from fifty years before, which became a living memory to help cope with what was going on and to give meaning to it. I think it would be wrong to regard this episode as reflecting unfinished or unresolved matters from that analysis, since the intervening fifty were, in the main, happy and stable ones. My analysis had examined and helped me modify but never fundamentally to change personality organization and this can be regarded as the expectable outcome of a good-enough analysis.
