Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper explores a ten-year analytic relationship through the lens of analyst as patient dealing with love and loss. The patient is witness to her analyst’s mind succumbing to dementia. The vault of encrypted memory, containing the years of work, is under attack. Juxtaposing moments of dementia madness are shared space connected to significant expansion of mind and emotional experience. This experience challenges all framework of psychoanalytic work, and yet it doesn’t. Psychoanalysis espouses giving patients: meaning, vitality, sturdiness, and an expansive emotional range of experiences. This analytic work accomplished these features and more. But, what does it mean to be held in mind when the analyst mind has been highjacked by a paranoid delusion momentarily? Moreover, delusions of persecution reflect profound fear and anxiety with the loss of the ability to tell what’s real and what’s not. Delusions are a common feature of dementia. Delusions are often triggered by memory loss connected to simple things like losing one’s keys. My lived story of personal transformation lives among the mind field of sporadic delusions sometimes expressed by my analyst’s mind. What happens to psychoanalytic work when the vault of the analyst mind is compromised by dementia?
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