ABSTRACT
An early morning patient talks about his growing realisation that his longvilified business associate is a stand-in for aspects of himself that he hates. The next patient, two years in analysis, twitches in silence, thrashing about, complaining that he does not know what to talk about. What is the point of lying in silence, he wonders, if neither of us has an agenda for him? I remain silent. The next patient, a schizophrenic woman in her second analysis, is just now allowing herself to recollect her childhood which she does in a kind of Proustian narrative, moving from room to room, person to person, and event to event, in a meticulous if somewhat cautious manner. She is followed by a brilliant former philanderer who has sexualised all his relations in order to evacuate others along with extinguished instincts, now in the third month of a depressive breakdown. After tea an anorexic adolescent arrives in a manic mood, determined to convince me that her body is of no consequence and a hindrance to the transcendent beauty of disincarnated thought.
