ABSTRACT
The patient is a woman of twenty-six, an only child. She is a psychologist, has just graduated, and was sent to me by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. She started analysis, four times a week, about a month ago. Right at the beginning she said that what had happened during the last nine years of her life seemed to have happened only yesterday, and that she didn’t pay much attention to anything before that. What had happened was this: nine years ago her father got into trouble with the police over an involvement with a fifteen-year-old girl. The patient heard the news on the radio and read about it in the newspaper. From that moment on she followed all the activities of the police and the lawyers – her parents never talked about it, but she knew everything that was going on. The family moved from one town to another, running from the police. Now the father is on bail awaiting trial. The mother married against her family’s wishes; she was very wealthy, but the father was just a janitor in a building downtown.
