ABSTRACT
Some 20 years ago, I was conducting a psychoanalytic session when it suddenly felt to me as if I were experiencing a heart attack. Violent shooting pains occurred in my arms and my chest. I felt uncontrollable spasms and could hardly breathe. By using yoga breathing techniques I was somehow able to manage my symptoms until they abated, and the patient on the couch was not aware of what I was going through. After the session medical checks revealed no signs of anything the matter with my heart and circulation. I then realised that the session had been the last one before a holiday break with an emotionally, extremely disconnected patient whose father had suddenly died of a heart attack during a holiday when she was a child. The patient was massively insulated, against taking anything in or expressing any genuine emotion, by a chronic state of manic defence. She also had an eating disorder, which had resulted in her being morbidly obese, so that she was physically insulated from the world around her. I have since come to believe that my “heart attack” was a spectacular countertransference phenomenon where the patient projected into me the inexpressible feelings about a father who died of a heart attack during a holiday break by somehow making me feel that I was the father dying at the beginning of the holiday break.
