Meeting Again, Meeting Anew: A Child Patient Returns as an Adult

Abstract

While many analysts have former patients return to treatment years after termination, it is more unusual for a former child patient to return as an adult. Such situations provide unique windows into development, both the patient’s and the analyst’s. They also present special opportunities for considering the fluidity and bidirectionality of psychic time. I describe my work with Charlotte, a five-year-old patient who returned to treatment with me 20 years later. Through the case, I examine the convergence of old and new representations of self and other, and the interrelation of temporal modes as a co-constructed, emergent aspect of the analytic process. With returning patients, past meets present as old relational patterns, idealizations, fears, and wishes emerge in the here-and-now. This can result in blind spots, repetitions, and enactments, but it can also allow for new, co-created experience, as past and present shape each other in an ongoing dialectic.