The Dream of The Broken Horses

9

Who can know the human heart?

We call it ‘transference,’ the phenomenon that occurs when a witness believes he or she can recall a face, and then, failing to do so, describes the features of the artist. In such cases, the witness does not intend to deceit and rarely recognizes what he/she has done. It's an unconscious process, but when it occurs the witness must be considered unreliable. Even if Kate were now to revise her description of the shooter, her memory has been contaminated. Any drawings made with her must now be held suspect.

After some serious drinking in Waldo's, I return to my room, tape the drawing to the mirror above the desk, sit before it, and gaze at the two images of myself.

Not a bad self-portrait, I think. In retrospect, I'm not surprised Kate couldn't recall the shooter. My wish that she could was founded more in hope than in belief.

Except… there's another possibility, one so abhorrent and painful I can barely bring myself to consider it.

I step over to the closet and retrieve the locked briefcase I keep hidden at the bottom of my garment bag. It's here I've secreted the folder I came upon last spring in he attic of my mother's house in L.A. when, following her death, my sister and I cleaned it out.

The folder contains various documents concerning my father: a copy of his will; papers having to do with the sale of our old house on Demington Drive; personal letters; family photographs; the incomplete draft of a professional paper he'd been working on at the time of his death; an agenda book showing his professional appointments that final year; and the strange photograph of Barbara Fulraine bearing the signature Studio Fesse.

It doesn't take me long to find what I'm looking for, a formal studio photograph of Dad taken but a few months before he leapt to his death. It appeared, along with similar photos of other local shrinks, in a Fetschrift published by the Calista Psychoanalytic Institute to honor Dad's mentor and training analyst, the much-loved and admired Dr. Isadore Mendoza, who'd studied with and been analyzed by Dr. V. D. Nadel, who in turn had studied with and been analyzed by Sigmund Freud himself.

I take the photo over to the mirror, tape it beside my drawing, resume my seat, then study the three images together.

Sensitive eyes, prominent cheekbones, slightly sunken cheeks: no question there's a strong resemblance. When Dad took the plunge he was forty-three, five years older than I am now.

A kind man's face, the face of a man who listens to you, cares about you, cares about your feelings – the face of a man who can help you uncover and comprehend your truth.

Yes, Dad and I, father and son, definitely look alike. The resemblance, I've been told, is striking. People have mentioned it to me all my life.

So… was Kate's description a classic transference reaction, as I would like to think, or was it, as I would hate to believe, an uncannily accurate description of the man she saw in a black raincoat and fedora departing the Flamingo Court just seconds after Barbara Fulraine and Tom Jessup were shot?

Tonight, lying in bed, I reread Dad's unfinished draft case history, the same document I copied for Mace:

D R A F T "THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES"

by Thomas Rubin, M.D.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following case study is of necessity incomplete due to the death by homicide of the patient while undergoing psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, I believe it to be of special interest on account of the nature of the patient's neurosis, including a debilitating recurrent dream; difficult resistance, transference and countertransference issues; and the possibility that these issues, being still unresolved, contributed to the tragic end of the patient's life.

Although for this reason one might conclude that the analysis was a failure, I hope it will be viewed in a different light: an example of the limitations of traditional therapeutic practice and an inspiration to those in our profession who, out of a desire to alleviate human suffering, are willing to plough new ground even when doing so creates risk.

THE ANALYSAND: Mrs. F, a white divorced female in her mid-thirties of high social and financial standing, well-educated and in excellent physical health, the mother of three children, the youngest of whom was abducted and, it is believed, murdered five years prior to the commencement of treatment. Mrs. F could be fairly described as possessing great beauty and personal allure, qualities for which she was well-known in her community. She came across as extremely poised and self-possessed, yet stated: “All the people who envy me would pity me if they knew how screwed up I am.”

PRESENTING SYMPTOMS: Mrs. F, self-referred, described herself as deeply unhappy (“I see myself as a tragic figure”); suffering from erotomania (“I think I might be a nymphomaniac”); ego disturbed (“sometimes I feel like I don't know who I am”); perverted (“I have these kinky fantasies, which I guess is all right… except I try to live them out”); in spiritual pain (“I feel wounded in my sex”); and possessed by a terrifying enigmatic recurring dream (“it haunts my days, ruins my nights”). Mrs. F, summing up: “So, doctor, I'm one sick babe, right?”

FAMILY HISTORY: Mrs. F had unusual parents. She described her father as ‘drop-dead handsome, a lady-killer. Women would take one look at him then go weak in the knees.’ Her father, Jack, was a racehorse trainer and self-described racetrack character and tout. People around the track called him ‘Blackjack’ on account of his dark complexion and dashing good looks. Mrs. F described him as charming, easygoing, a philanderer, and ‘a man's man in that men instantly liked him and usually continued to like him even when they found out he was making it with their wives.’

Mrs. F's mother was also a member of the gambling demimonde, an expert poker player and racetrack handicapper. Mrs. F described her as ‘pale and beautiful, a glacial ice goddess type.’ According to Mrs. F, her mother, unlike her father, was respected but not well liked. Mrs. F described her as tough, aloof, and extremely strict. Whenever she caught Mrs. F in a fib, she would slap her hard across the face, telling her ‘You're acting like your father's child’ and/or ‘You want to know why you're a liar? Because you're from a bad seed.’

Mrs. F's parents fought constantly and were divorced when she was seven. After that, she lived with her mother while seeing her father two weekends a month until, two years later, he relocated to another part of the country. Although her parents moved in the same racetrack circle, during that two-year period they rarely spoke and could barely bring themselves to be civil. Mrs. F recalled her mother constantly referring to her father as ‘that bastard,’ ‘that son of a bitch,’ etc. And although her father did not speak poorly of her mother, he would ask after her in such a way as to suggest barely concealed contempt.

A couple of years after Mrs. F's father left town, he stopped sending child-support payments. Nevertheless, Mrs. F's mother made enormous sacrifices to keep Mrs. F in the exclusive private girls' day school in which she was enrolled. In return, her mother required her to maintain top grades, excel in sports, and participate in extracurricular activities and student government. As Mrs. F put it": “She turned me into a supreme competitor. I was to compete in every possible field with the goal of achieving total victory in each. Nothing less would be tolerated. Even the slightest failure was punished.” Beside such punishments as slaps and grounding, Mrs. F's mother's favorite disciplinary method was to withhold affection. “If she wasn't happy with me, she'd go glacial. Then she'd act like I was this object of revulsion, too disgusting even to be acknowledged.”

Mrs. F believes her mother's sole objective those years was to groom her to make what her mother would term ‘a magnificent marriage.’ Later, when Mrs. F married into one of the wealthiest, most socially prominent families in her city, her mother changed her tack. The morning of her wedding day, she whispered into Mrs. F's ear: ‘I know you're marrying for money and position and in my eyes that makes you a whore.’

Mrs. F stated that throughout her school years she loathed her mother while adoring the memory of her absent father, spending hours recalling their wonderful times together. Most of those memories centered around horses. Her father had taught her to ride, first putting her on a horse when she was three years old. “He was a wonderful teacher, kind, helpful, always calm. ‘You'll be a great horsewoman,’ he'd tell me. ‘Maybe the first girl jock to win a major derby.’ When I was five, he gave me my first horse, a filly with a white-tipped tail whom I named Banjo. He taught me how to groom her, care for her, and love her. He trained us together, me to ride her, she to be ridden by me. Oh, he was so proud!”

After Mrs. F's father left town, her mother wanted her to continue riding but in a different style. She took her out of the racetrack environment, enrolling her in a school of traditional equitation. Here the objective was not to learn how to race but to become a show equestrienne. The instructor, G, a middle-aged Hungarian refugee, taught the demanding art of dressage. G was the opposite of Mrs. F's father, strict, tense, an old-school disciplinarian. Mrs. F longed to ride fast and free again but under G's tutelage was not allowed to do so. And since Banjo had not been trained for dressage, her mother sold the horse, using the money to pay for her riding lessons. Of this betrayal, Mrs. F stated: “I've never forgiven her for that and I never will.”

Although her mother insisted Mrs. F's father had abandoned her, Mrs. F always believed her father would reappear one day to rescue her from her mother's strict discipline. Although her father drifted around the country from track to track, he still managed to write occasionally, sending her notes around Christmas and on her birthdays. These communications tended to be brief and increasingly impersonal in tone. He never gave his phone number, and several times, when Mrs. F tried to call him, she discovered he was unlisted or had moved. She harbored the fantasy that one day she would run away from her mother, find her father, and that they would live together happily ever after. When despite numerous written pleas her father did not appear at her high school graduation, Mrs. F finally gave up the fantasy. By that time, having followed her mother's design, she was the second top student in academics in her class, captain of the field hockey and tennis teams, a member of the student council, easily the most honored girl in her school. “I was also the most envied,” she said. “Mother always warned me that was the price I'd pay. ‘They'll envy you when you beat them,’ she told me, ‘but still you hold the power.‘”

Mrs. F recalled early sexual feelings dating from around the time her father moved out of the house. She found the atmosphere around the racetrack stables ‘sexy’ and constantly schemed to spend time there with her dad. She liked the smell of the horses and the smell of the leather tack. She was also fascinated by the genitalia of male horses. It was at the stables, she believed, in an atmosphere fraught with talk of mares, stallions, and geldings, that she became conscious of and fascinated by gender differences. Here, too, it was possible to embrace horses without hearing recrimination that such embraces were improper. She believed this was important, as her mother often warned her about touching people and allowing herself to be touched. She remembers overhearing her mother angrily accuse her father of fondling her too much, and her father replying that he would continue to do so ‘‘cause I don't want her to end up a frigid hard-ass like you’ – or words to that effect.

After her father left, her mother took on a succession of lovers. These relationships rarely lasted more than a year. Just as Mrs. F would grow fond of one of these boyfriends, her mother would break up with him. The breakups were inevitably bitter. Her mother would berate the boyfriend, banish him from her presence, angrily tear up all photos of him, and command Mrs. F never to utter his name again.

Mrs. F's mother warned her about men, their rotten nature and ulterior motives. ‘Men,’ she told Mrs. F, ‘only want one thing. Once you give it to them, you're finished.’ Cautioning Mrs. F not to engage in premarital sexual activity, she admonished, ‘Remember, no one buys a use slip!’

Mrs. F's mother was a stickler for cleanliness. Donning rubber gloves, she thoroughly cleaned house every day. She assiduously trained Mrs. F in matters of personal hygiene and inspected her nails each morning before she left for school. On one occasion, when Mrs. F left a ring around the tub, she was forced to scour the entire bathroom again and again. Whenever Mrs. F dared to use foul language or speak of sex, she was instructed to wash out her mouth with soap. Mrs. F was taught that sex was dirty. Her mother told her: ‘Men are dirty and your father was the dirtiest of them all.’ She also told her that boys were her enemy and that in dance class, when Mrs. F's school held jointly with a nearby boys' academy, she should not allow boys to hold her too close or else ‘you'll feel their stupid things poking at you through their trousers.’ Mrs. F recalled that when her mother broached the subject of menstruation, “she did so with a lot of nose twitching and disgust.”

On one occasion, when Mrs. F was twelve, her riding instructor, G, slapped her to punish an error she'd made in dressage. Mrs. F, outraged, fled class. When she reported the slap to her mother, her mother told her she'd already heard from G about the incident. ‘You weren't paying attention so he slapped you to wake you up,’ her mother said. ‘He has my permission to do so again if necessary.’

Thereafter Mrs. F was terrified of G, whom, in any case, she had never liked. In retrospect, she believed G colluded with her mother, then took advantage of his authority over her by touching her in intimate ways. Though not overtly abusive, this touching was clearly sexual. Under the guise of correcting her posture, G would lightly grasp her buttocks and graze her budding breasts with his hands. He insisted she ride bareback ‘so you can feel the horses' withers in your wound.’^1 He instructed her to grasp the horse with her knees, then ‘grind in with your crotch.’ He also instructed her not to wear underclothing beneath her jodhpurs during these bareback riding sessions ‘so you can make close contact, really feel the animal, control him with your body.’ Mrs. F found this latter statement disconcerting since she was riding a filly at the time. When closely questioned about this, she insisted her memory was correct. “G was formal and correct. He always addressed me as ‘Miss’ and of course riders are always aware of the gender of their horses. So when he spoke of controlling ‘him with your body’ I took that as a deliberate reference to having sex.”

Over the next year, she heard similar tales of intimate touching by G from other girls in her riding class. Realizing that with this information she now had power over G, she told him one day after class that she wished to speak to him in private.:

“I was nearly fourteen. I had a good figure and knew males found me attractive. G suggested we talk in the tack room. Once inside, he closed the door. I told him all the girls were complaining about his touching and that if he didn't stop sooner or later one would tell her parents and then he'd be in a sea of trouble. He glared at me, told me he didn't know what I was talking about and I'd better be sure of my ground before making accusations. Something about his manner told me he was bluffing, that all I had to do was hold my own and stare him down. So I told him I was sure, that he wasn't to touch me anymore, and that if he did I'd make it my mission in life to see him ruined. He asked me if that was all. No, I told him, there was something else. I told him I still resented that he'd slapped me, and I wanted an apology for that. He looked at me curiously, smiled slightly, told me he could do better. ‘You can slap me back,’ he said, then paused. ‘If you have the nerve.’ Well, I don't know where I found the nerve, but somehow I did. I pulled back my arm and slapped him as hard as I could across his face. He took my slap, didn't flinch. ‘Not bad,’ he said afterwards, smiling, massaging his cheek. ‘I like a girl who stands up for herself.‘”

Mrs. F confessed that she'd taken great pleasure in delivering that slap, and not just because she'd had her revenge. “I felt physically warm and slick below. I got a sexual charge out of it, no question.”

From that time until she went off to college four years later, she continued her riding lessons with G but on a new basis. Though G continued to instruct her, his manner with her became almost obsequious. And now that she no longer feared him, she learned much more from him than before. “He wasn't at all like Dad. He wasn't easygoing or fun, but he was a fine teacher, respectful and full of good advice. And

1. When asked whether G really used the word ‘wound,’ Mrs. F insisted that he had. When asked whether it were possible G had actually said ‘womb,’ Mrs. F vigorously shook her head, replying, “I'm positive he called it my wound.” Note the similarity in concept between her belief that G called her genital area her wound and perhaps the most vividly described of her presenting symptoms: “I feel injured in my sex.” now there was something between us, the light slap he'd given me years before and the very hard one I'd returned. Those two slaps were always in the background of our relationship.”

Over the next few years, G attempted to train Mrs. F to Olympic standards. She rode well, won numerous competitions, accumulated numerous trophies and ribbons. But they both knew there was no way she could become an Olympic-level equestrienne without training on a champion-caliber horse. This was not to be. She had other interests, her mother didn't have the money, and she didn't want to be beholden to a wealthy sponsor.

In the spring of her senior year, she went for her final lesson with G. The lesson went well. She took all her jumps with great poise. Afterwards, G invited her into the tack room for a farewell toast. There he opened a bottle of champagne and poured them each a glass. ‘To a fine rider and a magnificent woman,’ he said, clicking his glass against hers. They reminisced, laughed, she thanked him for his efforts with her, and he thanked her for her diligence and talent. Just as it was getting time to be on her way, he asked if she remembered the slap she'd given him in that very room. Over the years they'd never spoken of it. Now, suddenly, G brought it up.

Yes, she told him, she remembered. “That was our turning point,” she said. He agreed it had been and that he was sorry for any sorrow he may have caused her. He told her that, yes, he did like young women, found them beautiful, and that he knew he'd been wrong to touch them the way he had, and that he was grateful to her for having warned him off this admittedly unattractive practice. ‘I owe you a great deal for that,’ G said, ‘and yet there's something else I'd ask you to do for me.’ When she asked him what that was, he told her he would appreciate it very much if she would slap him hard once again.

She was astonished by his request, excited by it, too. “You really want that?” she asked. He said he did, that he needed it as a reminder to behave himself. Though she would be gone, he told her, he would still be instructing young girls, thus he wanted to carry the sting of her slap as a memory. She let him plead a while, then agreed.

“Again,” she said, “I pulled back my arm and hit him as hard as I could. I was bigger then, stronger, able to hit much harder. In fact, I hit him so hard that this time he reeled back.”

Again she felt the same slick warmth below, but much more powerfully than when she was fourteen. She was eighteen years old then, knew she was a beauty, had confidence, poise, was a fully sexual being. And this time G reacted differently. He fell to his knees before her, lowered his head, and slavishly kissed the uppers of her tall, black riding boots. Studying him as he did, she felt a great surge of power. She reached down, placed her fingers in G's hair, pulled his head toward her crotch. At this, he gently pulled down her jodhpurs, buried his head in her groin, and performed cunnilingus upon her. “I came within seconds,” she said. It was the first time she'd ever had oral sex with a man. After her orgasm, she pushed him away, buttoned up her riding pants, and told him she had to go. Her last image of G was of him still on his knees, bent over, head turned toward the tack room floor. She never saw him again.^2

During the winter term of her first year in college, she received news of her father's death. He was training a horse while drunk, fell off, and suffered a mortal head injury. She was greatly upset by this news and went into what she termed “a deep depression.”

Coming out of it that spring, she began a succession of brief sexual affairs with boys. Most were one- or two-night stands, others continued for several weeks. She wanted to learn about men and male sexuality and felt the best way to do this was to have sex with as many boys as possible.

She said she found these sexual explorations enormously liberating, as she was now for the first time away from home and out of her mother's control. And she made an effort, she said, when breaking up with her lovers, not to replicate the cruel, dismissive manner of her mother. Rather, she said, she took pains “to show compassion, letting them down easy so as not to bruise their tender egos.”

She soon developed a fondness for experienced, affectionate men, culminating in an affair with a graduate teaching assistant, H, who was ten years older, and which lasted through the winter and spring terms of

2. Various bits of this narrative, not recounted here, strongly suggest the possibility that G and Mrs. F's mother had an affair in the past and that Mrs. F somehow understood this. her sophomore year.

When it came time to break off with H, his reaction was unexpected. Rather than accepting her decision, as others had, H took to stalking her, following her about campus, phoning her then hanging up when she answered, finding her in the college library when she was studying, sitting across the table from her then staring at her until she looked up, etc. Frightened, she confronted him. H told her he adored her and couldn't live without her, that he didn't want to stalk her but felt compelled to do so since the compulsion was beyond his control. Though unmoved by his professions of adoration, she felt thrilled for having inspired them. Describing the sensation, she said: “I felt enormously powerful and I believe the feeling was erotic.”

She knew she was seductive and felt moved to test her seductive powers again and again. “I make men fall in love with me, bring them to their knees so to speak, then I would reaffirm my power as a woman. But once I conquered them, I quickly lost interest. For me the seductions were far more interesting than the relationships. Actually I found hanging out with these lovesick guys quite tiresome after a while.”

Concerned that her sexual behavior was becoming obsessive, she sought out therapy at the student health services division of her college. Here, asked whether she had a gender preference in regard to the therapist, she specifically requested a male. Dr. L, the man to whom she was assigned, was a clinical psychologist in his forties, married with three children. Asked how she knew this, she replied that he displayed an array of family photographs on his office desk.

Immediately, she said, she set out to seduce him. All she had to do, she said, was recount her sexual adventures, including detailed descriptions of her lovemaking and the explosive power of her orgasms. “I had him panting for me before the end of our first hour,” she said.

After two weeks, Dr L yielded to her completely. “He was an easy score,” she said. She described pulling off her panties, balling them up and throwing them at him, the perching on his desk and pulling up her skirt. Immediately, she said he performed cunnilingus upon her. “I came so wildly,” she said, “thrashing about, I swept all his family photos to the floor.”

When asked if this gesture was deliberate, whether in retrospect she thought she was trying to displace Dr. L's loved ones, she answered in the affirmative. “I think I wanted to demolish his crummy little middle-class existence.”

Afterwards, Dr. L expressed great remorse, declaring he'd acted unprofessionally and would probably be fired, perhaps even blacklisted, if she ever told anyone what they'd done.

She remembered holding Dr. L in her arms, assuring him she would never tell and assuming all blame for their ‘indiscretion.’ At the end of the session, Dr. L told her he could not treat her any longer, that she had ‘acted out’ her problem on him and ‘I stupidly fell for the bait.’ He told her that in his opinion she needed intensive psychotherapy and recommended a female colleague. ‘But please,’ he begged her, ‘don't tell Dr. D what we did.’ When she asked how she could not tell Dr. D since what they had done was a symptom of the problem she needed to work through, Dr. L placed his head in his arms on his desk and sobbed.*3

Mrs. F decided not to pursue treatment with Dr. D. “For one thing, I'd lost confidence in the process. These psychologists, it seemed to me, were as weak or weaker than my fellow students. Also I had no desire to work with a woman. That would be too much like trying to get help from my mom.”

Instead, Mrs. F threw herself into sports and extracurricular activities, trying out for and winning a place on the women's varsity tennis squad. She also joined the college drama society and played secondary roles in several school plays.*4

*3 For further discussion of this incident and its relation to Mrs. F's psychoanalysis, see TRANSERENCE ISSUES ARISING IN THERAPY below

*4 In the course of one of these productions, she began an affair with another student, M, a drama major, who wanted to pursue a professional career in the theater. Some years later, after she was married, she used her position as a board member of the professional theater company in her city to secure M an appointment there as associate director. Then, when M moved to her city to take up his new position, she resumed her affair with him even though she was still married.

She met her future husband, A, her junior year at a horse-riding club dance when she was home for Christmas break. He was handsome, rich, smart, charming, and athletic, having all the qualities she felt a suitable husband should possess. He was clearly taken with her and she liked him too. “I don't know that I was actually in love with him, because, you see, I don't know if I'm really capable of love. But he was wonderful to be with. We had a lot of fun and the sex was great. So I decided ‘Hey! This one's probably worth holding onto.’”

They became engaged and were married three years later. Meantime, after graduation, she'd moved back to her hometown, taking up a job with a local arts organization. She rented her own apartment far from her mother's and spent several nights a week with her fiance.

During the period of her engagement, Mrs. F tried to work things out with her mother. They had a number of conversations in which each pledged to respect the choices of the other. They seemed to reach a modus Vivendi, and she was pleased that her mother seemed to like and approve of her fiance. For this reason, she was shocked when on her wedding day her mother accused her of being a whore. “It was as if she was trying to ruin the little happiness I'd managed to eke out.”

A year or so into the marriage, her pleasure in having sex with A began to diminish. By the second year, each had discreetly taken on a lover, accepted practice in their circle.^5

Together she and A had three children, two sons and a daughter. Then, eight years into her marriage, her three-year-old daughter, Belle, was snatched by her live-in au pair. The au pair turned up dead, and although the little girl was never seen again, Mrs. F was convinced she was still alive.

Mrs. F was frantic. She made immense efforts to find her missing daughter, including, when law-enforcement officials admitted they were stymied, hiring private investigators, fortune-tellers, psychics, anyone she thought could help. She was also racked with guilt, blaming herself for Belle's abduction. “If I'd been home taking care of my children the way a decent mother should… if I hadn't been so spoiled by A's money that I entrusted my children to that horrible woman… if I hadn't been spending so much of my time screwing everything in trousers…” Resigned, she added: “Well, I guess I got what was coming to me. You know. Punishment for my sins.”

When asked whom she thought was punishing her in this way, she had no ready answer. “I don't know. God, I suppose.” When asked if she genuinely believed that the tragedy of her daughter's disappearance (and presumed death) was commensurate with the sins she thought she'd committed, she shrugged off the query. “Rationally, no, of course not.” But still, whenever she mentioned the event, which she termed “the central tragedy of my life,” she spoke of it in such a way as to suggest she believed the crime had been directed personally against her.^6

It was approximately six weeks after the abduction that Mrs. F had a certain vivid dream for the first time, a dream she described as “a sex dream” and which she came to call “The Dream of the Broken Horses.” She dreamt this dream in several variations over a period of five years. It was the repetition of the dream, its haunting quality, and her belief that it contained an encoded message pertaining to the whereabouts of her abducted daughter that had, she said, brought on her decision to undergo psychoanalysis. It was her hope, she said, that analysis might lead to the decoding of her dream or at least to an interpretation that would free her from its terrifying power.

THE DREAM: Mrs. F recounted the dream during her first session. Later she would recount it in other variations. In each case, though, the matrix would remain the same but certain particulars (such as genders, locales, colors, times of day) would be changed and even reversed. When asked about these variations, Mrs. F insisted that this was the way she dreamt, i.e., sometimes she would be wearing a red lower garment, at other times would be naked, etc.

*5 “We weren't swingers or wife swappers or anything tacky as that,” Mrs. F explained, “but in our crowd we all had covert affairs outside our marriages. This added spice and the sneaking around was fun, all the hushed phone calls and secret meetings in out-of-the-way places. My husband enjoyed it as much as I, and when he and I had sex, it was always in the background. I'm pretty sure it added to his excitement. I know it did to mine.”

*6 In one session, Mrs. F related her fantasy that Belle, still alive, was working as a child sex slave in a whorehouse catering to sailors. “She could be paying for my sins even as we speak,” she added tearfully.

This was so odd that the possibility had to be considered that Mrs. F was unconsciously inventing these variations to screen the essential dream and thus render it opaque. It also suggested a great richness of meanings, strata that would have to be explored level by level before the essential underlying meaning would be revealed.

In a footnote to the famous The Case of the Wolfman, Freud wrote: ‘It is always a strict law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every detail.’ But the founder offered no practical approach to interpretation of a dream such as the one under discussion here, in which the details appear to be in a state of flux. This taking both views into account, I determined that Mrs. F's first rendition was the most important, the die or mold, so to speak, from which all the later recounted variations were cast:

It's dusk. I'm riding a black horse, a stallion. I'm wearing red jodhpurs with nothing underneath, feeling the warmth and muscularity of my horse in my sex. At first I'm riding alone on a prairie with mountains in the background. Then other riders join me from behind, hooded men in black garments whose face I cannot see. We become a kind of posse, with me in the lead, though soon I notice two of the other riders gaining on my flanks. I try to escape them. All our horses are frothing from the exertion. I want to be the lead rider. Then suddenly I realize we are not a posse; they are the posse and I am their quarry. Terrified, I drive my heels into the flanks of my horse, slash at his shoulders with my crop, and surge ahead. Soon I'm flying fast. My horse if foaming at the mouth. When I touch him I can feel his sweat and can also feel my own wetness in my crotch. I turn to see the posse falling behind. Then, suddenly, the horses in the posse begin to break up. Legs snap and crumble, heads fall off at the neck, riders are thrown to the ground as the horses, which now no longer appear to be living creatures but rather made of something hard and brittle like clay or bronze, tumble and crash, breaking apart like fallen statues. At last, free of the threat, I feel released and victorious. But then I discover that my own horse is breaking apart too. This is when I always wake up, sexually aroused, panting, heart beating rapidly, nightgown and sheets drenched with sweat.”

Variations recounted at other times: * Mrs. F, rather than wearing red jodhpurs, wears flesh-colored ones, or rides bottomless, or rides topless while wearing red jodhpurs; * Rather than being pursued by a posse, a sole faceless, hooded horseperson is in pursuit, revealed to be a woman when the wind blows the hood back from the pursuer's face, revealing in turn that the hood is lined with flaming red fabric; * The pursuit takes place in a Western desert, or along a dangerous narrow winding path up into hills, or on a dangerous steep descent; * The dream takes place against a sky blood-red from the setting sun with very long shadows cast up the sands, or upon a moonlit rocky landscape at night; * There is someone riding ahead of her, someone she, in turn, is pursuing, someone frightening whom she cannot see except for occasional glimpses from the rear; * She has an orgasm at the moment her own horse breaks apart.

ANALYSIS: Before discussing Mrs. F's associations to this rich lode of dream material, it might be well, in terms of clarification, to anticipate certain questions.

In response to my query "Why do you believe this dream has anything to do with your daughter's disappearance and present whereabouts?" Mrs. F repeated that she'd dreamt it for the first time shortly after Belle's abduction. “Also, it's so mysterious I always assumed there was a connection; after all, finding Belle was the only thing that mattered to me then.” When asked in a follow-up whether she believed dreams contain hidden messages, she replied with a question of her own: “Isn't that what you analysts believe?”

In the ensuing discussion about the nature of dreams, their relevance as internal messages, windows into the unconscious processes of the dreamer as opposed to coded messages from an external source, Mrs. F showed herself fully aware of the difference. But she stated that although she had never thought of herself as particularly superstitious, the crisis of Belle's disappearance had opened her to such paranormal notions as telepathy. “I guess maybe I'm like a terminal cancer patient holding out for some kind of miracle cure. I so need to find Belle if she's still alive that I'll hang on to anything that offers me the slightest hope.”

With this in mind, despite doubts that the actual dream content (as opposed to the emotional crisis state in which the dream was dreamt) had anything to do with Belle, I nevertheless told Mrs. F, in hopes of motivating her to work hard on the interpretation, that her dream, properly interpreted, might convey some message pertaining to Belle, a message from her unconscious that she already knew but hadn't yet been able to face. To this Mrs. F responded with a knowing nod. “If my dream tells me I must give up my search, I'm prepared to accept that. But first I must be convinced.”

Mrs. F's numerous associations to the dream material poured out of her over several sessions in what can only be described as a torrent. The dream's central image – the transformation of the horses from creatures of sinew and blood into brittle, breakable horse statues – reminded her, she said, of the broken agonized horse in Picasso's great painting, "Guernica," which had transfixed her when she'd first seen it in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Every time I'm in New York, I go to see it again. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it, because the Spanish Civil War context doesn't interest me much. I think it's just that horse, his pain, you know… since I love horses and always have. Yes, that's what kills me – his agony, his pain.”

Since even a cursory look at a reproduction of "Guernica" suggests the twisted broken horse is female^7 (no visible external genitalia), this gender confusion, so reminiscent of Mrs. F's distress when her riding instructor, G, referred to the filly she was riding as ‘him,’ suggested the possibility that much of the dream might be connected to G, perhaps to relations between them that Mrs. F had repressed.

When asked to free-associate to her vision of red jodhpurs, Mrs. F replied immediately that this was her sex. “That's why I'm sometimes bottomless bottomless in the dream,” she said. “For me being bottomless and wearing red jodhpurs (and I've never seen jodhpurs that color) amount to the same thing. And of course riding a horse makes me feel sexy, not just in the dream but in real life too. I adore horses and all that, but I think the reason I still ride is the sexy way it makes me feel.”

After more discussion, I pointed out that red was the only vivid color in her dream. Everything else – hooded men, horses, the terrain – was either muted or black. But not only were her jodhpurs red; in one of the variations, the pursuing posse consisted of a woman wearing a flaming red lined hood and in another variation the sky was blood red. To this Mrs. F responded: “So red must stand for blood. I wonder…,” she said, again associating the dream with something G had said, “… might that be blood from my ‘wound’?”^8

Associating to the concept of a woman's sex as a wound, Mrs. F recounted more about how her mother had conveyed revulsion when warning her of the agonies of menstruation. “She always called it ‘the curse’ and told me it was a punishment for sexual thoughts and acts. Of course, I knew a lot about it already. There was endless talk about it at school. I also remember when I was little and came across her tampons and asked her what they were, she made up some cover story that I knew was phony. That told me there must be something disgusting about those things, and I knew that if Mom thought something was disgusting it either had to do with going to the bathroom or with sex.^9

Was this why she called her dream “a sex dream”?

*7 Many commentators have interpreted the broken horse in the painting as a symbol of the suffering of the Spanish Republic, a feminine entity.

*8 In an earlier session, Mrs. F described a dream in which she saw herself lying on a snow-white sheet covered with hundreds of droplets of blood. Though, in my view not connected to the recurrent dream under discussion, this second dream seemed most curiously to prophesy her own death scene in that she was killed by pellets fired from a shotgun while lying with her lover on a motel room bed.

*9 Again, this is reminiscent of Mrs. F's presenting symptom: “I feel injured in my sex.”

“Yes,” she replied, “and also because I sometime come just at the climax of it. And even when I don't come and am terrified when I wake up, still after dreaming it I almost always feel aroused. Like I said, riding arouses me. I like to have sex that way too – you know, sitting on the man, riding him. That's always been my favorite way of having sex. And of course in the dream I'm on a stallion.”

What about some of the other imagery in the dream, the references to the pursuing men gaining on her ‘flanks’ and of her driving her heels into ‘the flanks’ of her horse.

Yes, she agreed, that imagery too was sexual, as was the riding crop.^10 In fact, she said, she'd recently posed for what she called ‘an art photograph’ in riding attire bowing a riding crop between her hands. “I was bare-breasted in it, too,” she added with a giggle, “just like I am sometimes in the dream.”

At this point, she stated that in her opinion the dream was totally about sex and nothing else. Talking it over with you, I see that. Everything in it is about sex. Everything! The faceless men – often when I have sex with a man I don't see his face. I may be looking at him, staring right into his eyes, but while in the act I don't ‘see’ him at all.”

There was also the matter of the men's horses breaking apart. “Those are their orgasms,” she said. “They lose their seats, topple over. Once they come they're finished. So am I the horses breaking up beneath them? No, I don't think so. I think they are the horses breaking beneath me. I ride them till they break to bits!”

What about the sensation of being part of the posse then the sudden frightening realization that she's the one being pursued?

“Isn't that what sex is like It is for me. Men pursue me all the time. Sometimes I'm out with people when suddenly someone in the group decides to make me his sexual prey. Or I decide to make prey of him.” She laughed. “Actually, more often than not, though they may not know it, it's me who pursues.”

PATIENT'S SITUATION AT THE TIME OF ANALYSIS: At this point, it might be well to break off from the interpretation of the dream and review Mrs. F's personal situation and the background that led to the start of her analysis.

She approached me at a social gathering held at the school that our sons attended. She and I had met casually on other occasions, but this was the first time we spoke in private.

She told me she was interested in undergoing psychoanalysis and asked if she could call me at my office the following day for some professional advice. When she called, she stated she'd decided she wanted to undertake analysis with me “rather than with some ‘perfectly competent’ shrink you might refer me to.”

An appointment was made to discuss the pros and cons of her seeking treatment with an analyst with whom she shared several social acquaintances. At this meeting, she resisted all suggestions that she follow up on my proffered referrals. “I want you! The truth is we barely know one another and our circles barely touch. The only connection is that our sons attend the same school. Should I be deprived of your analytic skills because of that? Or is there something else? Yes, I think there is! You've heard gossip about me… me and some of my peccadilloes. Well, maybe that's why I need you. Isn't a person in need entitled to the therapist of her choice?”*11

*10 Mrs. F spoke of having assembled a large collection of riding crops, the most prized of which, she said, was a crop her father had given her when she was a little girl and he first set her on a horse.

*11 What Mrs. F had said was true: I had heard gossip about her. She was well-known in the community because of the notoriety surrounding Belle's abduction, her activities were regularly reported in the social columns of the local papers, and certain aspects of her behavior, regarded by some as scandalous, were widely discussed. For this reason, I deferred a decision until I could consult on ethical and professional considerations with a colleague, my former training analyst who was also president of the local psychoanalytic institute. After a wide-ranging discussion, this colleague recommended that I accept Mrs. F's suggestion. ‘You certainly have my blessing in the matter. After all, why should the lady be deprived? And if problems do arise, my door is always open for consultation.’

I bring this up for two reasons: to clarify the record as to all ramifications surrounding treatment, and to put the transference and countertransference issues that arose during therapy into better perspective.

The gossip to which Mrs. F referred concerned her relationship with a certain notorious local personality. This man, C, owner of a high-class restaurant-nightclub that also had a back room for illegal gambling, was widely believed to have underworld connections. It was also widely believed that Mrs. F was C's mistress, a fact which Mrs. F confirmed in her second session. In the same session, she stated that her relationship with C was “extremely complex” and that she had thought about breaking it off but was hesitant because C “has this terrible temper” and “he's been known to get violent with women when he thinks they're betraying him.” In response to my query as to whether in fact she was betraying him, she smiled demurely, adding “that depends on what you mean by betrayal.”*12

As these seductive references arose frequently over the weeks during which her key dream was under interpretation, I made numerous attempts to demonstrate connections between this behavior and the dream content.

ANALYSIS (continued):

Having established that ‘everything in the dreams is about sex,’ I reminded Mrs. F of her seduction of her college therapist, Dr. L.

“Do you think I'm doing the same thing with you?” she asked. Then, in the face of my silence, she offered the following extraordinarily perceptive response to her own query: “If it's true I am, and I can see why you might think so, then there must be some connection to the dream.”

This was the opening I'd been waiting for, an opportunity to explore the dream at a deeper level. "I'd like you to tell me about the horse you're riding, whatever comes to mind."

“Well,” she said, “as I've told you, he was a stallion, black, black as night.” She broke off her statement and then, after a brief silence, suddenly turned her head around to meet my eyes. “I know just what you're thinking,” she said, aggressively. Resuming her normal position on the couch, she continued scornfully: “You're thinking “black horse” equals ‘Blackjack’ You'd have me having sex with my father in the dream. That's what all you analysts think we want – to screw our fathers, right?”

When I reminded Mrs. F that the equation she'd just presented had come from her not me, she stated: “You led me straight to it like a horse to water, didn't you?’

But despite her brief flurry of resistance, Mrs. F quickly showed interest in pursuing this line of interpretation. She offered: “Dad was teaching me to ride fast and free. That was how I always wanted to ride but wasn't allowed to by Mom. All those years studying with G, learning to do that stupid dressage! But riding fast and free is what I do in the dream, once I get going anyway. I break out from the pack. I go so fast I nearly fly. That's what's so wonderful, so liberating, so sexy, I guess – riding my magnificent black horse faster than the wind!"

At the end of the session Mrs. F said she felt exhilarated. “I think we made real progress today.” She apologized for snapping at me. “I think maybe I did that because what you said just cut too close to the bone.”

During the next session, resistance showed itself again. “I know what you're thinking – that Dad fondled me too much the way Mom accused him of doing. But I know that isn't true. He was just a loving guy, a real hands-on-type guy. That's how he trained horses – talking to them softly, touching them, fondling them if you will. That's just how he was. There wasn't anything sexual about the way he touched me.”

However, again her resistance quickly gave way when I explained to her that it wasn’t so much a matter of her father's intentions or what he actually did, but how his touching affected her, especially as

*12 When I remained silent in accordance with standard therapeutic practice, Mrs. F continued: ”I may not be betraying him now but I have in the past and I can't imagine I won't want to again.”

From the very start of her analysis, Mrs. F slipped in numerous references such as this regarding her self-described “voracious sexuality.” She seemed to go to great pains and to take special pleasure in making it clear to me just how highly sexed she was. She said of herself “I guess I'm a, you know – a real nympho…” and on many occasion as she referred to herself as “a slut,” “a hussy,” “a real bitch-slut, “a bitch-in-heat,” etc. Such usages made sharp contrast with her otherwise dignified, ladylike, indeed aristocratic self-presentation. There was no question that these references were blatant attempts to be seductive with me. the overheard quarrel about it between her mother and father planted her mother's notion that it was wrongfully sexual in her mind.

Mrs. F readily accepted this interpretation. “If I'm twisted, it must be Mom who made me this way,” she said. She then launched into a lengthy list of grievances against her mother, all pertaining to her mother's teachings that sex was dirty and wrong and thus should not and could not be enjoyed. “I sure rebelled against that!” she said. “I adore sex.”

When I pointed out that she used the same word, ‘adore,’ in regard to her feelings toward horses, she quickly put the interpretations together: “I ‘adore’ sex and I ‘adore’ horses. I feel sexy riding horses and I like to ‘ride’ my lovers when I have sex. I like to ride their cocks and I like to ride their faces, too. In the dream I ride a big black horse, which could be Blackjack, and it was Blackjack, Dad, who first put me on a horse and taught me how to ride. I know having sex with Blackjack is wrong, so Blackjack breaks apart beneath me as I ride him. And then I come, just the way I do when I have sex with my lovers. I ride them till they come, till they ‘break.’ Then I come and break too. So there it is, at least the center of it.” At which point she turned her head toward me. “That's what you wanted me to see, isn't it?”

At the start of the next session, Mrs. F handed me a large manila envelope. When I asked her what it contained, she responded: “It's something we talked about. I thought you'd be interested in seeing it.”

Opening the envelope, I noticed Mrs. F observing me closely. Inside was the ‘art photograph’ she'd previously mentioned, the one of her in riding clothes, naked above the waist, staring seductively at the lens while bowing a taut riding crop between her hands.*13

TRANSFERENCE ISSUES ARISING IN THERAPY: One Monday morning Mrs. F arrived, flung off her coat, then, beaming, announced: “Seems on Friday our sons gave each other bloody noses.”*14 To this I promptly responded: "Does this excite you in some way?" “Well, yes, actually it does,” she said. “It seems so… well, you know… intimate.” I suggested we try to analyze why she found a fistfight between our sons to be sexually stimulating. Mrs. F, intelligent and quick-witted as ever, immediately made the connection: “It's the blood, isn't it? The wound. The red jodhpurs. The flaming hood. Our flesh-and-blood bloodied each other, and that's like you and me having sex.”

The following week she came in with another prepared bombshell: “Guess what, Doctor? I've taken on a new lover. And he has the same first name as you. Now that must mean something, mustn't it?

Mrs. F, of course, knew perfectly well what it meant and seemed highly amused at my concern. “You think I'm doing a number on you, but it's really just a coincidence. He's so cute, this guy, that I decided I couldn’t deprive myself just because your names happen to be the same.”

Again we analyzed her statements. She had used the very same expression (‘deprive myself’) when I'd expressed doubts about undertaking her analysis. And I assured her that my concern was not over the coincidence of the names^15 but that by taking on a new lover without having first broken with C,

*13 At this point I should state that in all my years of practice I never worked with an analysand so intent on my seduction. Though training teaches us how to employ strong transference reactions in furtherance of analytic goals, it cannot fully prepare one for an onslaught of such intensity, especially when the analysand is extraordinarily attractive, experienced, and well tuned to her effect upon men. Furthermore, in the case under discussion, I was well warned by the analysand via her tale of her seduction of Dr. L. But despite my experience and training and the clear warning issued by the analysand herself, I had no adequate preparation for an offering such as the one described above, in which the analysand presented me with a recent photograph of herself half naked in a highly charged and bizarre erotic posture.

As mentioned, this offering was just one of several such demarches made by Mrs. F, nearly all of which occurred in the context of our probing of the meaning to her ‘sex dream.’ It was as if, the closer we came to a deep interpretation of her dream, the more compulsive became her attempts to seduce me.

These maneuvers usually took place at or near the beginning of our sessions. Mrs. F would introduce something provocative as if in an attempt to confuse me and throw the analysis off course. These transparent attempts to derail treatment were easily parried by ignoring the provocation or offering a quick and pointed interpretation. It soon became apparent that Mrs. F prepared these incitements in advance. When swiftly dealt with, she would settle down, ready to do the hard and painful work that is a requirement of a successful analysis.

*14 In fact, authorities at our sons' school had arranged a boxing match to settle a personal quarrel between them. betraying him in effect, she might be unconsciously courting danger.

She then imparted the following unexpected information: She had first met T at the same school reception where she'd approached me about her desire to undergo analysis. In fact, T was a teacher at our sons' school. After meeting him and hearing how much her sons liked him, she'd hired him to give her sons private coaching and tutoring.

In our next session, she described in detail how she'd decided that T, employed in this capacity, would make a good lover and how she'd initiated (i.e., seduced him into) an affair:

“I went out to our tennis court to watch him practice with my boys because they were proud of their progress and wanted me to see it for myself. It was a very hot afternoon. My boys and T, all three in shorts and stripped to the waist, were batting balls back and forth, really working up a sweat. So here's this really good-looking guy with the body of a Greek god! How could I resist? After my boys finished their lesson, they urged the two of us to play. ‘Come on, Mom!’ ‘Yeah, Mom, we know you're club champ, but I bet T can kick your butt!’ ‘Yeah, let's see who's better, Mom. Come on! Just one set, okay?’

“So I went down to the pool house, changed into tennis gear, then stepped onto the court. T's a terrific player. It was fun to play with him. Soon it was clear we were very much in tune. And with the boys there urging us on, cheering for him, clearly wanting him to win, all my competitive juices were aroused. I wanted to win, needed to, so I started playing really hard. And he, responding, quickly raised the level of his game.”

The tennis match, as she described it, was clearly foreplay for the sex that followed within the hour. Mrs. F was quick to grasp that much of her imagery – ‘in tune,’ ‘aroused,’ ‘juices,’ ‘playing hard,’ ‘raised the level’ – was highly sexual in nature. And with my assistance, she came to understand that the performance of such an extended act of foreplay in the presence of her sons was a provocation in itself.

"So how do you think all this relates to your dream?" I asked near the end of the session.

“I'm having sex in front of my sons.”

"And in the dream?"

Mrs. F shrugged. “I don't see any connection.”

I suggested we go back and reexamine the circumstances under which she first met T, at the same occasion, in fact within the same hour, that she first broached the possibility of analytic treatment with me.

I offered her the following interpretation:

"There were are, two men, both with the same first name. And the context in which you meet us is almost incestuous – my son and yours attend the same school. Within days you retain me as your analyst and retain T as your sons' coach. Then, while filling our sessions here three mornings a week with provocative sexual statements, setting upon my seduction, even going so far as to present me with an erotic photograph of yourself, you literally seduce this other man, my double so to speak, and in fact do so right in front of your sons. What's more, while this double seduction is going on – my ‘psychic seduction’ and T's literal seduction – one of your sons fights a boxing match with mine in which each boy bloodies the others's nose. And there's something else you mentioned in only the most peripheral way – T not only coached your sons in tennis, he coached them in boxing too. In fact, I learned from my own boy that he served as referee of their match. So in a sense, we could say you hired T to teach your sons to bloody my son's nose. Next session let's try to pull this all together in the context of your dream, because, you see, I think we're getting close now to its underlying meaning, the meaning that terrifies you even as it excites you."

ANALYSIS (continued): Consistent with past behavior, Mrs. F immediately demonstrated her resistance at the start of the next session by making the following statement:

*15 In fact, though mine is a fairly common name, I didn't doubt for a moment that this was far more than mere coincidence. However, I decided not to dwell on the matter just then, believing there was something deeper to be uncovered.

“I'm having such a busy twenty-four hours! Last night I had The Dream again and got all sexy on account of it. Early this morning I went riding, and that, as usual, got me juiced up. Now I'm here to discuss it… and I always find our meetings sexy in a cools sort of way. Then I'm off to meet C for lunch and a hot bout of rough sex. Then after a quick stop home for a shower, I'll meet T at our usual seedy motel for silken loving sex, the kind I've come lately to appreciate more and more. He's so tender with me, so sweet, loving, and eager to please…, etc.^16

Feeling that this could be a crucial session, I decided to postpone further analysis of her dream till later in the hour. Instead I asked her to describe the difference between the sex she was having with her two lovers, whom, she had just made clear, she was no longer meeting on separate days but was now seeing, provocatively, back to back.

"Well, Doctor,” she smirked, “to satisfy your prurient interest, C is one hard-ass lover. That, I think, is originally what attracted me. He's dark, hairy, charming, glossy, an old-fashioned ‘lounge lizard’ type. But there isn't a hell of a lot of heart there if you know what I mean. For him sex is rough-and-tumble without much tenderness. When we started our affair, I pretty much let him take over. You know, “do with me what you will.” He told me, ‘You're a classy lady and that makes me want to dirty you up.’ When I asked him what he meant, he said he wanted to make me gasp and scream. ‘No polite little orgasms, thank you, ma'am,’ he said. So I told him, “I love getting carried away, so please, if you think you can send me like that, by all means try.” Oh, he tried all right! I really made him work for it! We'd wrestle and slap and scratch – the whole nine yards. But, see, being dominated doesn't really do it for me. To be satisfied, I need to be in control. So over the course of time, things began to change, with me taking over more and more. The way things are now, we both get ‘dirtied’ up. Now he loses his cool. With me he's no longer the unflappable, slightly malevolent, hail-fellow-well-met nightclub impresario. When I ride him, he turns into just another panting boy screaming for release.”

I quote Mrs. F's statement in extensor to illustrate how her neurosis, as exemplified in what I had now come to regard as her ‘key’ or ‘master’ dream, was determining her love relationships. Her descriptions of C were so close to her earlier descriptions of her father, Blackjack, as to be transparent to even the most naive observer. Yet it seemed that Mrs. F still resisted making this connection.*17

Here now is her description of her lovemaking with my namesake and ‘love proxy’ T.:

“T is a really gorgeous guy, lean, hard, blondish, fair-skinned without much body hair. So physically he and C couldn’t be more different. Different in personality too, because T's a sweetheart. With him there's none of the slapping and scratching I do with C. We make love gently and slowly, excruciatingly slowly sometimes. Yeah, C makes me scream, but with T, I can really lose myself, forget who I am. He doesn't want to ‘dirty’ me up. He only wants to worship me. He adores me for who I am, not what I represent. I find that so refreshing.^18 But if you're wondering why I keep seeing them both, I guess it's because each satisfies a different need. C gives me what I think I crave, while T gives me what I really Want.”

Mrs. F smiled. “Pretty complicated, huh?”

*16 In response to my query, "Do you see how you always start our sessions like this, talking abut your sex life and never failing to add me to the mix?" Mrs. F laughed. “Well, isn't sex what psychoanalysis is about? Aren't I being a good patient by building up a strong transference bond with you?”

*17 Strangely, she'd also seemingly never made the connection between her father's profession or racehorse trainer and C's ownership of a casino. The fact that both men worked in the gambling industry appeared to have entirely escaped her notice.

*18 I found this idealization of her relationship with T suspect in view of other information she imparted. For instance, she told me how she'd arranged to meet him one day at the Municipal Aquarium in front of a large tank containing sharks. Describing their kiss in front of the lit tank while the sharks swirled behind, she said: “That felt so bold. I think I did it to insert some drama into our affair.” Later, when I described this encounter to a colleague, he pointed out a strong similarity to a scene in the film Lady From Shanghai in which the actors, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, kiss in front of an aquarium containing a huge octopus. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to ask Mrs. F if she'd seen this film and whether it had inspired her choice of the location of her rendezvous. Still, whether she knew the film or not, the scene suggests she saw herself in a femme fatale role with T.

As the hour was now nearly over and since she'd redreamt her key dream the night before, I asked her to relate any new particulars she'd found memorable.

She said that in this latest rendition, the lone pursuing faceless hooded horseman was revealed, when the wind blew back his hood, to be the pursuing horsewoman whose hood was lined with flaming red silk.

She I asked her to describe the features and/or expression on this pursuing horsewoman's face, she said the woman appeared cold and grim, “kind of like my mother watching a horse race when she had a lot of money riding on a horse.”

Considering this a major breakthrough, I urged her to give me her associations to the red-lined hood. Her response was immediate: “It's like the hood of a clitoris.”

"So," I said, pursuing the interpretation, "the face of the pursuing horseman turns out to be like your mother's, peering at you out of her clitoris."

Mrs. F, accepting that, urged me to go on.

"And the horseman you're pursuing – did you see him a little better last night?"

She said she did get a couple of good glimpses of him before their horses broke.

And what did she see?

Not much, she said. Just that he was big, broad-shouldered, and was wearing a black, hooded duster that covered him completely from the rear. Also that his horse was black.

“Could he be Blackjack?’ she suddenly asked. “Not the horse I'm riding, but the horse and rider ahead?”

I assured her that indeed he could be Blackjack. As it was now the end of the hour, I added that I felt that her being pursued by her mother while in the act of pursuing her father was a key to opening the meaning of her dream, a key I hoped we would turn together next time.

“You think it really happened, the dream?” she asked.

I told her that I felt that the way she reworked the dream material in different ways suggested that she was circling some dreaded and real traumatic event that she'd repressed and that she was now attempting to bring to the surface.

A NEW APPROACH TO A TRANSFERENCE CRISIS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: "ENTERING IN": Sexual seduction was Mrs. F's game, her stock-in-trade. It was also the clearest manifestation of her neurosis. By attempting to draw me into her web, she was acting out in accordance with the very compulsions that made her so unhappy. The pitiful Dr. L, whom she'd so quickly seduced in her college days, was but one of a string of seductees used and then discarded as she veered ever more rapidly into a sexual maelstrom that, as it turned out, would lead to her destruction.^19

This analytic dilemma was made all the more acute by the possibility that real harm could come upon Mrs. F on account of her risky engagements-back-to-back affairs with a naive, young man disarmed by her guile, and an insanely jealous lover with underworld connections and a reputation for violence. And I

*19 At this point, it would be disingenuous not to mention certain difficult countertransference issues that arose in the course of this analysis. Mrs. F, it should be remembered, was a woman of stunning attractiveness with well-honed and well-practiced techniques of seduction at her command. Though I, an experienced analyst, understood exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, I nevertheless felt it incumbent to seek special counseling from my former training analyst in order to forestall reactions on my part that could hinder the analysis of this anguished and highly vulnerable patient.

I recommend such counseling to colleagues who find themselves facing a similar dilemma. The stresses of such situations, normal analytic techniques may be insufficient to deflect the patient's fantasies, and the strain upon the analyst's professional demeanor, not to mention his/her ego, can be crushingly intense.

For me to have yielded in any fashion to her campaign (and it truly was a campaign, waged by her the way a military commander marshals resources while waging war) would not only have vitiated any gains made during the analysis, but also would likely have served to hasten the breakdown toward which this astonishing patient appeared to be heading. She was spinning her web around me the way the predatory black widow spider spins a web about its sexual mate, with the purpose of luring me into an affair or even a single sexual act that would ‘break’ me just as it had broken the unfortunate Dr. L. Such breaking, I believed, was akin to the ‘breaking’ of the horses in her dream. had to take seriously my own role should a tragedy occur: that her provocation (i.e., taking on T as a lover), though clearly directed at me, might also provoke C into a violent response.*20

For these reasons, I decided to embark upon a new approach.*21

At our next session, anticipating the usual sexual provocations, I told Mrs. F, the moment she lay down on the couch, that I'd been thinking of her a great deal lately and not only in an analytic way.

"Perhaps," I told her, "my regard for you is not so cool as you think."

At this, just as anticipated, she twisted around so she could meet my eyes. “God! What are you telling me?” she asked.

"Look, we've agreed you've been trying to seduce me. I'm telling you that you've succeeded. Consider me seduced. Think of me dreaming about you, getting horny thinking of you, masturbating with you in mind. Think about that. How does that make you feel?"

Still staring at me, she started to blink. Clearly I'd taken her by surprise. “Well, I don't know,” she said. “I mean… how should I feel?”

"Victorious?"

“A little maybe.”

"Satisfied?"

“We'd have to make love for me to feel that.”

"Ambushed?"

“Yes,” she smiled, “a little.” She peered at me. “Are you putting me on, or is this for real?”

"Sounds like you're confused."

“Yes… yes I'm confused,” she admitted.

At this point, I urged her to assume her normal position on the couch. We were, I reminded her, still in session and our exchanges were part of her therapy.

“Doesn't sound very orthodox to me,” she opined.

I told her that even in so rigorous a discipline as psychoanalysis, extraordinary situations may require extraordinary methods. I'd decided, I told her, to depart from normative technique because I felt hat was the best way to access the unconscious processes inherent in her dream.

"What I want you to do," I told her, "is to imagine you've been successful, that I've been thoroughly seduced. With that as a given, I'm hopeful you'll dispense with further efforts along those lines and proceed into fresh territory, territory that may by truly fearful but which for your own good we must

*20 As I put it to my former training analyst: To what extent was I obliged to step out of my role as analyst and directly warn Mrs. F of the danger she was courting?

The answer was not so obvious. By stepping out of my analytic role, I could, by that single stroke, dismantle the entire substructure of the analysis. But by maintaining ‘analytic distance,’ I might not only be acquiescing but also contributing toward a possible tragic denouement.

Left with such a difficult choice, I set upon a course of action (see following) that, though unorthodox in the extreme, I believed was the only course open to me in what I considered to be urgent circumstances. Having received counseling against this course from my most respected colleague, I undertook it nonetheless and take full responsibility for all its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen.

I raise the matter here not as a mea culpa nor to anticipate criticism of my handling of the case, but simply to suggest the complexities that may arise in an analysis in which the transference / countertransference phenomenon reaches proportions beyond the normal range.

*21 My first step was to quickly determine whether Mrs. F was telling the truth, whether, in fact, she really was conducting two simultaneous affairs or whether this was a fantasy or a claim contrived to arouse me. Though I believed her story was real, I needed to know for certain in order to evaluate the hazards inherent in her situation.

Using information she'd given me, I staked out the motel where she'd told me, she and T met for their afternoon rendezvous. (I hope colleagues will forgive my use of a word normally associated with detective fiction; in fact, as Freud himself pointed out numerous times, much of what we do in our profession is akin to detective work.)

While doing this, I was careful not to be seen, well aware of the risks both to my professional reputation and to the analysis itself. Confirming by sight that indeed she was meeting T at the motel, I put my plan into play. explore.

“Okay, I get it now,” she said. “It's like a game, isn't it?”

"What's your fantasy about us?" I asked.

“Oh, Doctor, we're being prurient again!” she said. But launching into her sex fantasy, she quickly gave up her sarcastic tone as highly charged descriptions of the most lascivious acts spewed from her mouth.

I won't record the whole gamut here. In our practices, many of us have experienced similar onslaughts. Of course what was important was not the particular content of Mrs. F's fantasies but the fact that she was finally able to let loose with them in a manner at odds with all her earlier braggadocio. Now, at last, with her feelings out of control, she was involved in true associative work. She was, so to speak, ‘clearing the air,’ or, perhaps better put, cleaning the cobwebs from her id. When, finally, she stopped, it was clear this outpouring had been cathartic. Her forehead was moist, her blouse was soaked, her body was trembling on the couch.

“Guess what, Doctor?” she said. “I think I've… well, can you believe it? I've been touching myself all this time while I've been talking and… I believe I've had… an orgasm.”

By this latest display, Mrs. F, it seemed, had, at least in her own mind, successfully trumped my new approach to her treatment. But I quickly countered with a ploy of my own, which, I admit, under the duress of her provocation, I improvised on the spot. I told her: "What you've just done is try to sabotage our

At this point, in mid-sentence, Dad's draft case study suddenly breaks off.