ABSTRACT
At the beginning of a long period of therapy, Brenda’s therapist experiences her as very polite, distant, self-analytical, and unemotional—apart from her eviscerating embarrassment about self-revelation and her crippling guilt about being in therapy at all when “there are so many people out there with real problems”. She distrusts warmth or compassion—what she spittingly labels as pity but is exquisitely sensitive to a therapist’s attunement and understanding. The slightest hint of not being heard or seen accurately or of unempathic analysis or rigidity sends her into retreat. Her presenting issue was lack of meaning in her life, and it was clear that she believed that she could analyse herself out of the problem if she—or her therapist—thought hard enough. The fact that she had been trying to figure out the point of life since her teens and still hadn’t by the age of thirty-eight caused her despair. But it has never occurred to her that there was any other approach to the problem than through thinking. She worked in IT and was quite good at it but found it soul-destroying and didn’t know how long she could continue to make herself do it; she wanted to return to college to study philosophy, anthropology, or English literature.
