ABSTRACT
Parallel with the inner movement that seemed to be bringing her alive as a person there was another which she feared was going in the opposite direction, since it showed as a lessening of her clinging so exclusively to common-sense reality, a movement which was interpreted by her as ‘going mad’. Gradually I was able to get her to see that she might be becoming able to make fuller use of her analysis just because she was now more able to risk letting go her too-rigid clinging to what she called sanity. For instance, there had been a day, in June 1948, when she said she suddenly had the feeling that if she looked at me something awful would happen. What I seem to have said was, ‘You are afraid of seeing me as different, perhaps?’ to which she had answered, ‘Yes, that’s the worst thing that could happen: you might not change back.’ And two days later she had suddenly seen me as a dead body sitting up with eyes shut in a coffin, so that I at once thought of her finding the dead Mrs Dick.
