ABSTRACT
A female voice left a message on my answer phone that morning. She spoke quickly, asked if I could see her ‘briefly’, and concluded by saying that I had been recommended to her by a colleague, Dr D. Her request for a ‘brief’ visit and the rapidity of her speech annoyed me. This negative countertransferential mood was accompanied by the fantasy that the patient was not interested in long-term psychoanalytic treatment, which is what I would have preferred.
