ABSTRACT
The patient is often himself not aware of the implications of what he expresses. To the therapist who listens, a statement may be the carrier of a significant affective message, while the patient just experiences it as a factual or neutral statement with no particular significance. The therapist is starting to form ideas of an underlying greed, and an unconscious wish to get rid of the sister, which again causes her to carry an unacknowledged sense of guilt. The therapist communicates this idea of guilt to the patient in the form of a hypothesis. The therapist’s strategy consists in bringing the dizziness into a dynamic connection. He attempts to make M experience that becoming dizzy contains an active intention, that it serves as a defence, and that this defence is set off in situations where a conflict is activated. From time to time the therapist may get the feeling that the dialogue moves in “familiar terrain”.
