A Patient Returns

T his paper about patients who return to treatment several years after their analyses ended explores a few of many questions that arise for most of us. First: out of what conscious and unconscious needs do some patients come back while most resist the universal temptation to do so? Second: what has the unexpected experience of renewing a treatment and relationship with particular individual patients meant to me after an absence in which both of us may have moved on to different stages of our lives? We analysts and therapists at work are solitary people, and need the corrective of sharing our experiences and the kinds of feelings we tend to keep within the confines of our private offices. This essay is such an attempt. I will begin by quoting parts of a recent clinical presentation of Ms. X that focused on how my fantasied relationships to the patient’s central objects may have affected the outcome of a very long, terminated analysis: