ABSTRACT
On that evening, Tomaz entered my office, smiled broadly, and apologized. “I’ve got to finish something here,” he said, beginning to click a text message on his cell phone. “It seems to me that the treatment is over,” he added humorously immediately after finishing. “I’ve achieved my goals, so it’s time, isn’t it? It’s taken me ten years.” I still did not understand what he was talking about, but I was well acquainted with his playful way. “I’ll explain, I’ll explain,” he said, returning to his phone, and began reading: “‘I can’t meet you today, I’m not feeling well.’ She wrote this to me this morning, and I felt like crying. You know how much I’ve been waiting for this date,” he said, adding, “but then I thought of you, and I thought of myself immediately taking the back seat of the bus. As we’ve been saying, I understood that I’m afraid to sit up front, to demand, to initiate, instead of only being nice all the time. And then, a minute before I rang your bell, I wrote her: ‘I can come bring you soup.’ I don’t know where I got the guts from to simply make it clear that I want to see her and that no sickness is going to get in my way.” I just smiled and nodded, well aware that underneath the humor and the playful language, we were always touching on a trauma concerning the abuse of power and aggression, along with Tomaz’s daily struggle related to money and women. It was difficult for him to connect with the parts of him that wished to take something for himself; for years he said he had been terrified of approaching women for fear that they would “smack him.” I understood that fear as also representing anxiety lest the woman would discover his “sexual-aggressive motives,” to which she would respond aggressively and attack him.
