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I felt I was walking on eggshells, that any strong intervention which broke this pattern might produce collapse. I began to feel that what was governing the analysis was a sense of enormous frailty. The patient occupied my mind with her ‘sweet reason’ analysis and I formed the impression that I was supposed to admire it and abandon my own views. I also felt that if I intervened I would disrupt her security and catastrophic breakdown might follow. She conducted herself in a way that prevented me from having intercourse with my own views so that I experienced that there was no accommodation for me as an individual.

History can be doctored for infinite reasons, and those that attempt to reconstruct the past are subject to these vicissitudes; this applies to analyst and analysand. Less important truths may obscure more important ones: who ultimately can determine the priority of specific truths? Freud in 1937, late in his career, gave this example of reconstruction: Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole possessor of your mother, then came another baby and brought grave disillusionment. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you.

Nevertheless, subtle and less perceptible manic and paranoid defences may escape detection and may be used to avoid the awareness of the painful aspects of separation from a good human relationship. Similarly, other defences such as idealization, akin to mania, in which the analyst is invested with all the virtues that the patient identifies with, can be observed in their gross manifestations, but may be used in subtler ways to separate both analyst and patient from the truth and the awareness of its mutilation.