ABSTRACT
The author presents a clinical sequence during which the possibility of physical contact was approached as an open issue. There seemed to be a case for allowing a patient the possibility of holding his hand. The decision to reconsider this was arrived at from listening to the patient and from following closely the available cues from the countertransference. The operative factor is that the patient now hates the analyst for the failure that originally came as an environmental factor, outside the infant's area of omnipotent control, but that is now staged in the transference. To represent the central element of the original trauma the patient entered into an intensely real experience of the past as she had perceived it. Had the author resorted to the physical holding that he demanded, the central trauma would have remained frozen, and could have been regarded as perhaps forever unmanageable.
