ABSTRACT
Nina Coltart was not an ascetic. She was an inveterate smoker, enjoyed a good meal, and, as she told Molino, she developed an “active sex life” in her late twenties, a breakthrough she correlated with having ceased to believe in God “almost overnight”. Pivotal though the death of her parents undoubtedly was, Coltart’s analytically fostered recognition that her childhood had not been “blissfully happy” even before this disaster opens far-reaching vistas. Coltart suffered from osteoporosis, as well as heart and thyroid problems, and she underwent major abdominal surgery in the autumn of 1996. Coltart is far from being the only patient to have been let down by her first experience of analysis, especially one undertaken for training purposes. Coltart specifies the “five features that, together, characterize a vocation” as “giftedness, belief in the power of the unconscious, strength of purpose, reparativeness, and curiosity”.
