ABSTRACT
The tenth chapter presents a lifespan approach to the analysis of a young man, a thwarted singer-songwriter, who sought help for jealous thoughts he felt undermined his reality-testing. Travis worried that his lovers, of whom there were several, merely tolerated him. They lusted, in secret, after his more aggressive and successful rivals—or so he believed. I provide a developmental history and three representative sessions. I then suggest how a defensive and restorative regression analyst might conceptualize the process. The two regression accounts illuminate relevant childhood dynamics. But they leave open three gaps. They do not, for one, account for the specificity at play in the associations. Travis finds himself in rivalry with a specific male object (the rival artist) for a specific female object (the feminine muse). They reflect his childhood parents only through the later prism of his adolescent/young adult search for an identity in artistic production. They do not account, second, for the fear he has grounded his worth in a grandiose illusion. They do not touch, lastly, on the mourning implicit in accepting that he has failed to actualize his teenage dreams and in moving forwards toward a revised vision. A lifespan interpretation accounts for these gaps. It brings the childhood insights of the first two accounts into a further-reaching analysis of the tasks and dangers in the present.
