ABSTRACT
In this chapter I describe how a woman, in her late thirties, used her analysis to develop emotional and cognitive capacities paralysed during a childhood characterised by neglect and emotional abuse. Early deficits, combined with ongoing trauma and conflict, had resulted in a developmental impasse, a ‘standstill’, which brought her to treatment as an adult. Always watchful, she had, until then, kept people at bay in a way that was matched internally by rigid defences against thinking and feeling. This way of coping had ensured survival in the face of complex internal and external dangers, but precluded live engagement with her inner, emotional, imaginative, sexual self or the world outside.
