ABSTRACT
When an analyst has a clinical and ethical failure, that memory endures in her professional unconscious. In Anne’s treatment, we kept faith with our Heroic conventions, and we produced a persecutory structure. False courage, false compliance, true lies, true secrets, real hate, real shame and guilt: For me, this was a hall of mirrors in which my courage was lost. I don’t know what happened to Anne later. I do know what happened to me. I went on being, and I went on doing good work. But I had a disturbing clinical memory, which would never really convert into an I-ou history (see Grand, 2003). Isolated and Œxed in time, this memory kept conŒrming my familial legacy. I had an inadequate Heroic self, and I lived with “catastrophic loneliness” (Grand, 2000).
