ABSTRACT
In his beautiful book, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont ponders on how literature and poetry are full of tales of unhappy or fatal love stories, those that are: frowned upon and doomed by life itself. In De Rougemont's book, the romance of Tristan and Isolde becomes a myth essential for conveying the deeply obscure and unspeakable fact that passion is linked with death. Sandler says that the analyst perceives his or her counter-transferential reactions only after such reactions have been acted out. Elisabetta takes refuge in a state of increasing abulia, interspersed with visits to the maximum security prison. Elisabetta becomes more and more agitated and cannot glimpse any possibility for the future. This chapter describes the impact of an external/material reality at the limits of the believable of an apparently normal patient, with her common desires, who found herself, though, in the middle of events that were quite beyond her capacity of containing.
