ABSTRACT
When I opened my consulting room door to Matthew and Laura at the start of their first session, Laura was standing alone, slightly uncertain, but, paradoxically, with the air of a capable, sensible and precocious child. I experienced intense shock seeing her standing there alone. I had been expecting a couple, I had seen a couple: when I had opened my door at the end of the previous session to allow my patients to leave, I had seen Laura and Matthew waiting for their session together. I had seen that there were two, and now, ten minutes later, seemingly, there was one. I had an immediate embodied sense of a tension between the existence of a couple and a fragmented not-couple; the experience of something being shockingly absent and missing. This first interaction with Matthew and Laura, who were both 32 years old, conveyed clues as to what kind of shared unconscious wounds they might have shared.
