ABSTRACT
In that special way we intimately know some few people I know Arlene, who walked into my office just about 1 year after the termination of her treatment. There is no need to create a sense of “us.” It is there as soon as she enters, for I have known her in her earlier youthful struggles with relationships and professional possibilities, and I have wondered, with her, whether she could overcome psychological and medical obstacles and conceive a child. Within the peculiar confines of an analytic relationship, she and I celebrated her daughter’s birth. But, even before that, I was the absent member of her wedding party, the one missing from the pictures, but, in other senses, in them all. Like the invisible playmate some young children imaginatively create, I have been a constant unseen companion. Perhaps, at times, I am now in the way. Have I outlived my usefulness? Might Arlene’s husband wish I wasn’t in the bedroom as he hopefully gathers her into his arms?
