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research-article2015
APAXXX10.1177/0003065115618202Lucy LaFargeThe Fog of Disappointment

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Lucy LaFarge 63/6

The Fog of Disappointment, the

Cliffs of Disillusionment,
the Abyss of Despair

D isappointment is a universal theme in human experience. Essential

to child development, which requires us to give up the infantile
omnipotence that we invest in ourselves and our parents (Jacobson
1946), disappointment shadows us throughout adult life as we strive once
again to satisfy unquenchable desires (Schafer 1999). In addition to these
universal losses, and often linked to them, the work of the analyst brings
with it its own set of disappointments, as the analyst struggles to manage
his wishes for the patient and the process within the constraints of his
method (see Cooper, this issue) and as he is induced by the patient’s use
of projective identification to bear the patient’s disappointment, either as
the representative of an early object the patient wishes to disappoint or as
the representative of the patient’s own disappointment (Joseph 1982).
I wish to explore here a particular kind of disappointment that I have
observed in in the course of doing analysis. This kind of disappointment
is a soft-spoken state; it does not announce its presence sharply in my
thoughts but is a kind of sad fog that settles on the process, leading me to
lower my expectations for the outcome of the analysis. Of importance,
this kind of disappointment has tended to reside in the analysis as a shared
state, felt at the same time by both members of the dyad. Often it has been
the patient who has given voice to the disappointment, and although I
have explored the meaning of the patient’s lament, it has been hard for me
to interpret either the implied aggression or the implied sense of loss as

Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic

Training and Research; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical
College; North American Regional Editor, International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Submitted for publication October 1, 2015.

DOI: 10.1177/0003065115618202
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 Lucy LaFarge

effectively as I might have because the patient’s complaint has seemed to

me to be in part an accurate observation.
This kind of shared disappointment can usefully be viewed as a kind
of bastion—an experience of the field that is felt to be shared by both
analyst and patient but may be found on second look to have a different
dynamic significance for each (Baranger, Baranger, and Mom 1983).
With disappointment, as with other bastions, both the content of the
shared state and the quality of shared-ness protect analyst and patient
against individual experiences that are more conflictual and against the
sense of separateness and loss that each may feel in recognizing that she
is alone in these. In the analytic process, shared disappointment appears
to form a particularly stubborn bastion, one that requires of the analyst a
difficult and painful work of self-analysis. In order to consider the proper-
ties of the shared disappointed state and its key role in analysis, it is help-
ful to tease apart a trio of related states—disappointment, disillusionment,
and despair—to consider how each fits with the others and the particular
significance that each has for the analyst.
Disappointment and disillusionment are closely linked states, which
can be seen as blended or even identical, or as quite distinct. Jacobson
(1946) observes that the German word Enttäuschung, which is translated
in English as “disappointment,” conflates both terms, reflecting in its ety-
mological derivation the idea that the disappointing object has been found
to be an illusory one. In English the etymological derivations of “disap-
pointment” and “disillusionment,” and their dictionary definitions, are
quite different from one another (OED online 2014).
“Disappointment” has the meaning of a wish or expectation that is
unfulfilled; there is the idea of a story that unfolds over time in an unfor-
tunate way. This kind of narrative holds the idea that it could have come
out differently and perhaps, with some dramatic turnaround, it might still.
Disappointment bears the hallmarks of the depressive position: an experi-
ence of self and object that maintains some sense of hope in the face of
anger and loss, and a line of narrative that is continuous over time.
“Disillusionment” has the meaning of removing a false belief. It
describes a different kind of narrative, one that reflects not so much a story
in which wishes are unfulfilled but rather a story in which the very basis for
wishing, the qualities of the characters who figure in the story, must be radi-
cally revalued for the worse. The change that takes place is like going off a
cliff: the shift is abrupt and feels irreversible, and the newly discovered

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 The Fog of Disappointment

story feels discontinuous with the old one. This development bears the hall-
marks of the paranoid-schizoid position, and splitting plays a key role in the
preservation of a sense of the good self and the good object. If disillusion-
ment represents an abrupt shift to the worse in one’s apprehension of the
object and one’s relation to it—with the implication that the earlier object
was an idealized one, itself the product of splitting—this catastrophic
change is potentially limited by further splitting to a single object and a
single object relationship. A disillusioned patient may come to the belief
that his initial hopeful view of the analyst was entirely wrong but may move
on (in what may be a triumph of hope over experience) to a new analysis
with another analyst. Similarly, a disillusioned analyst may reject his for-
mer view of a patient as analyzable, but splitting confines the damage to a
single patient and the analyst’s work with her.
In despair, by contrast, no hope can be found for any object; splitting
has failed to protect the sense of a good object and of a self that can,
through reparation, make the object whole and good; and there is a feel-
ing of all-encompassing bleakness. The patient can no longer imagine
getting better in any treatment, and the analyst has lost hope in her capac-
ity to help any patient.
At some moments, disappointment, disillusionment, and despair may
occur as shadings of a single experience—notes within a single chord that
may be recognized in sequence or all at once. And fluctuations between
the three states occur as part of the necessary process of working through
loss, as the need to come to terms with external and internal reality
requires us to come to terms over and over with the gap between the
objects we wish for and the objects that reside in our inner world. In the
paper in which she introduces the concept of the depressive position,
Klein (1935) poignantly describes the way some patients hold within
them an image of the good mother that is felt to be only a beautiful pic-
ture, one that wards off a view of the mother as irreparably damaged and
dreaded. For these patients, the process of working through disillusion-
ment and experiencing the splitting that underlies a seemingly realistic
view of the object world, and further seeing that this splitting wards off
melancholic despair, is particularly clear, but the need to work through
disillusionment and despair in order to attain, or re-attain, the depressive
position is a universal one.
At certain moments, and chronically for certain individuals, the three
states—disappointment, disillusionment and despair—may operate

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 Lucy LaFarge

together as a unified defensive bulwark against more hopeful states. We

are all familiar with the turn toward the negative—toward faultfinding
and self-criticism—that often accompanies a success that is felt as oedi-
pal triumph. Schafer (1999) describes the use of chronic disappointment
as a defense against hopefulness that threatens both loss and punishment
or, if it is fully acknowledged, rage against the past objects who had
crushed early hopes.
At other moments, and for other individuals, the three states may be
held wide apart, and each may be used defensively against the others. We
may hold on to disillusionment—and complain chronically that our objects
are not as we thought or wished—rather than accepting them as they are
and creating a new narrative that includes this. And holding on to the state
of disappointment—to the belief that things should and could come out dif-
ferently—may protect us from the radical revision of our internal objects
that accompanies disillusionment, and, in addition, to the sense of melan-
cholic despair that we fear will follow this disillusionment.
Disappointment, disillusionment, and despair are felt by the analyst to
be particularly painful states because they reflect disturbances in her belief
in her own capacity for reparation—a capacity that is central to the ana-
lyst’s identity as analyst and that often has been central to her choice of this
profession. The presence of a good, intact, external object serves as reassur-
ance that our internal objects are also intact and good, and that our love for
them has prevailed over our destructive hatred (Klein 1935, 1940). When
she is succeeding in doing analysis, the analyst feels that she makes her
objects whole, and her sense that the patient is whole reassures her that she
is giving her love to the patient, and that she has love to give. The three
states—disappointment, disillusionment, and despair—in sequence reflect
an escalating sense of danger. For the analyst, the narrative of disappoint-
ment is one in which a particular attempt at reparation has failed, but repa-
ration remains a possibility in the analysis of this patient. With
disillusionment the damage is more profound: the analyst feels lacking and
damaged in whatever is necessary to help the patient, but splitting limits
this damage to a single relationship and protects the analyst’s belief in her
essential capacity. With despair, the analyst believes herself incapable of
helping any patient. More fundamentally, she loses faith in her capacity to
restore her own internal objects and make them good.
In the analytic situation, the patient’s disappointment may set off a
resonating cycle in which the analyst is threatened with a loss of faith in

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 The Fog of Disappointment

her own goodness, and where the patient in turn senses the analyst’s felt
incapacity and further loses hope. The patient’s projection of her own
sense of hopelessness into the analyst, as well as the patient’s destructive
anger at the disappointing analyst, intensifies this cycle. In this situation,
disappointment often serves, for both analyst and patient, as a kind of
holding operation, one that protects against a regressive slide to the two
more painful and dangerous states. For this reason, the quiet, steady
shared disappointment that I have observed in analysis can thus be seen
as a kind of key signal state (Smith 2000). For the analyst, disappointment
is a dangerous idea, one that she may first project into the patient and
recognize in the patient’s experience before acknowledging it in her own.
Like any endeavor, analysis entails disappointment—the idealized
expectations of patient and analyst can never be met—and this disap-
pointment must be worked through by both. However, a state of disap-
pointment that settles in is often an indication that the analyst cannot
grapple with the patient’s disappointment because doing so will open up
the patient’s underlying disillusion and despair, and these in turn will
evoke corresponding affects in the analyst. In order to engage the patient
effectively in the analysis of the patient’s disappointment, the analyst
must first, through self-analysis, come to terms with her own disappoint-
ment, disillusionment, and despair.

C l i n i c a l V i g n e tt e

A clinical vignette illustrates this approach in an analysis where disap-

pointment had become the dominant theme.
Anna, a divorced academic in her thirties, entered analysis in order to
understand the difficulties she encountered in establishing a new relation-
ship and moving ahead in her life; as our work continued, it became
apparent that these difficulties extended to her career, where she felt
blocked in producing the original work that would be necessary for her to
earn tenure.
At the beginning of the analysis,1 Anna had seemed to me to be only
tentatively engaged with me; she was critical of me and compared me
unfavorably to the therapist she had seen at college. After I had linked this

1Anna’s analysis was conducted on the couch at a frequency of three times a

week.

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 Lucy LaFarge

idea of a second-best replacement to the relationship problems that had

brought her to treatment, the analysis had deepened and begun to feel
promising to both of us.
But at the end of the second year, the analysis felt stalled, and Anna’s
life did as well. She remained quite blocked in her work. For many months
she had been involved with a man, Al, who loved her and wanted to marry
her, feelings she did not fully return. The process often felt dull, and I
found myself missing the creativity and liveliness that Anna had earlier
brought to our work. The sessions had a repetitive dynamic. Most often
they centered on her indecision about Al. Should she settle for this man? Was
he wrong for her, or was she simply unable to love, to replace the husband
who had left her? She wanted my help in deciding. In the countertransference
I was struck by the way Anna’s declared uncertainty about her feelings for
Al seemed out of synch with the sense of the man she conveyed to me: he
appeared to me, as she described him, to be clearly a bad match for her,
uneducated and not smart, while she was highly intelligent and intellec-
tual; at moments I also felt a deeper uneasiness about Al, a sense that he
was frightening in some way. But when I brought the contradictory qual-
ity of her communications to Anna’s attention, I became for her a forbid-
ding mother who did not wish her to have a man, like Anna’s own mother,
who had been unusually strict about dating and sexuality. Anna com-
plained about my failure to help her resolve her conflicts in love and work
and spoke regretfully of her growing disappointment with me and the
analysis. We made little progress either in understanding Anna’s conflicts
about Al or in exploring the deeper meaning of her complaints about me.
Unlike Anna’s transference to me as a forbidding oedipal mother, which
both of us identified, this sense of me as disappointing did not lead pro-
ductively to memories or associations that would link it in a meaningful
way to the past.
I began to feel disappointed in the analysis as well, and gradually I
became aware that my expectations for what the analysis might hold had
become lower. I could no longer fully access the memory of our earlier
lively sessions or imagine their return. In effect I had become disillu-
sioned with Anna and myself. As I explored my countertransference, I
found that this disillusion bordered on a kind of despair. When I was with
Anna I felt a lack of vitality in my work. I was reminded of a time when
I had returned to work after a medical illness, consciously confident that
I would recover fully but uncertain in my heart that I would ever operate

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 The Fog of Disappointment

at my former level. By accepting my lowered hopes for my work with

Anna, I was in a sense walling off that fear and despair, restricting it to
that single analysis and preventing it from spreading to my entire sense of
myself as an analyst.
In the sessions after I became aware of these aspects of my own dis-
appointment, I paid particular attention to Anna’s disappointment.
Gradually, as her disappointment became a focus of our work, I came to
realize that, like my own, Anna’s disappointment also covered over ele-
ments of disillusionment and despair. I will present the series of sessions
in which these elements became clearer and were interpreted; the long-
standing disappointment, which both of us had felt, lifted; and the analy-
sis began to move again.

First Session

Anna began the sessions by speaking about her hopelessness at work.

She had gone to her office the day before and felt completely blocked.
She felt she did not have what it took to do academic work. She thought
she should consider alternative work she could take with her degree,
where she might not have to publish.
I pointed out how she saw her block as monumental and final and
asked why this was. Anna affirmed this and looked a bit into her hopeless-
ness as something she brought to the situation, but then returned to simply
declaring that she did not have the ability to do her work.
Returning to her opening words, I said that these feelings at the office
must have been after our morning session the day before. Anna dismissed
the link that I attempted to make to our situation, and said that she had not
gone to her office directly after the session—or else she wouldn’t have
felt so bad. She returned to her usual lament about Al and her indecision.
However, perhaps prompted by the connection I had suggested between
her despair and her feelings with me, she shifted to a new tone of escalat-
ing anger. She was furious with me, she said. Why didn’t I give her the
help she needed? Her voice sounded truly angry and attacking, and she
spoke at length about her complaints. I listened without making any
intervention.

Comments

Anna begins this session, in a way that has become characteristic of

the analysis, with a declaration of hopelessness about herself and her

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 Lucy LaFarge

capacities. Temporally, these feelings must have emerged sometime after

her session with me the day before, but initially neither of us is willing to
confront the link between her hopelessness and her relation with me.
I pursue instead the melancholic, final quality of her experience.
Then—and I believe this is a result of the work I have done in the counter-
transference, in understanding the personal despair that Anna’s despair
evokes in me—I do make the transference connection.
Anna initially rejects the connection—“not directly after the ses-
sion”—and returns to complaints about Al, creating a familiar situation
where Al is the disappointing one and Anna and I can feel aligned in our
shared disparagement of him. I think though that the link I had made
between her disappointment and the transference, as well as my listening
without intervening as she continued her prolonged attack, signaled to
Anna that I was now better able to tolerate her anger and disappointment
with me; and she is able to express these with me much more strongly
than she has before. Her disappointment feels to her to be a legitimate
response to my work, and I am able to tolerate this and resonate with it.

Second Session

Anna began her next session by saying she had gone to her office
after our session the day before and for the first time in a long while found
herself excited about what she was writing. She was enjoying herself and
at the same time felt some other emotion—a sense of something complex
and darker. She felt alone when she was working, with a sense that she
could have only the work or closeness with me, not both. She had to leave
me to work. And all the time she was working, she felt as if she were run-
ning away from a voice telling her that she couldn’t do the work, that she
had no ability, the way she had felt yesterday.
I said that I thought those were complaints she had about me—that I
did not have the ability, or enough to give her. When she had gotten angry
at me yesterday for not giving her enough, she had been afraid that the
truth was that I did not have anything inside to give her.
Anna agreed vehemently. Her therapist at college had made her feel
alive. Although she worried that she couldn’t engage, there were some
people she could engage with and some she couldn’t. That was the prob-
lem with Al: he wasn’t one of those people who made her feel alive—
there wasn’t enough substance to him. It was painful, but she had realized
this in talking to me about him. She continued talking about Al.

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 The Fog of Disappointment

I said that although she was speaking to me about Al, I thought that
she was also, or even more, speaking about me—that she felt I did not
have enough to give her—and talking about Al to me was a way of dis-
guising how much she felt I was like Al.
“Yes, that’s true,” Anna said. “I’ve felt for a long time that you are not
enough alive. There’s a kind of obtuseness, a way you don’t pick up on
things or make connections the way my earlier therapist did. I have been
feeling for a long time that you do not have the talent or the life that I need
in order to make a connection.” She spoke at length with both sadness and
anger about her disillusionment with me—her sense that this was an
important phase of her life when she needed help and that the opportunity
for change would be lost because she was working with me.

Comments

I think that my own countertransference analysis and Anna’s subse-

quent more direct expression of her anger and disappointment with me in
the last session has begun to break up an impasse in which each of us felt
our mutual disappointment to be a legitimate, ultimately unanalyzable
assessment. Anna is now able to move out of this state for a bit, and as she
moves back into it, we begin to be able to see the dynamics of the shifts
and the defensive purposes that the stuck, disappointed state serves for
her.
After the last session, she felt more hopeful, and she indicates with
her opening line that she is now able to connect the change in her mood
to our session, as she could not the day before. She had the sense that
there was goodness and creativity inside her. However, unable to tolerate
her destructive feelings toward me and the loss of me that these feelings
threaten, she has taken into herself the empty depleted image that she has
seen in me. It is as if, as Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) has formulated, only
one of us can be repaired, and she must sacrifice her own creative capac-
ity in order to maintain a sense of me as whole and present.
At this point, feeling myself freer of the impasse, I am able to inter-
pret Anna’s movement back into it, pointing out the way she has managed
her anger and disappointment at me by turning them upon herself, taking
back into herself the empty depletion that she had felt to be in me. This
interpretation brings Anna back to a state where she is again able to toler-
ate her anger at me and begins to elaborate her experience of me as
depleted.

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 Lucy LaFarge

Then once again, Anna moves away from her anger at me, this time
into complaints about Al. It now becomes clearer to me that in many ways
Al is the target of Anna’s displaced criticisms toward me. The triangle
between Al, Anna, and me has in a sense been a pseudo-triangle in which
Al and I have reflected split aspects of the same object. I interpret the
displacement, and Anna is able to return to her exploration of her feared
disappointment with me.
Anna ends the session with the assertion that her view of me as empty
and useless is realistic and her disappointment with me entirely legitimate.
And Anna’s concerns are in fact resonant with the concerns I have had for
myself and my capacities following my illness. Nevertheless, I think that
both the content of my interpretations and my renewed ability to interpret
have brought both of us closer to the recognition that Anna’s disappointed
view of me as depleted is most importantly a transference—that the stronger
analytic self to which I have returned, confronting and interpreting, is not
identical to the image of the depleted analyst that had emerged between us.

Third Session

Anna’s tone had changed dramatically when she arrived at the next
session, the last I will report. Her voice was full of life and excitement.
She said she had had a strange and painful dream: A woman was telling
and showing her a true story. Anna felt overwhelmed with terror as she
waited to find out how the story would go. There were two parts to it. In
one part, a woman was in the apartment Anna had shared with her hus-
band. He had just left and the woman was looking around, feeling the
finality of the separation. Then, in the second part, the same woman was
in another apartment, one Anna had shared with her college roommate.
The woman was now completely different, not all the person she had been
in the first part; now she seemed terribly upset and disturbed. The woman
put on a black coat and went out into a dark and lonely street. Anna was
watching the woman and felt terrified of what would happen to her. She
called out the window to her, but the woman did not hear and went off
into the night.
The dream felt very real, Anna said. Very moved, she said she felt
that it was I who was telling her the story, that that had begun at last. She
had felt hope for the analysis, she said.
Continuing to associate to the dream, Anna said that both parts por-
trayed real events. The first part recalled the intense pain and loss that she

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had felt at the time of the divorce. The second part drew upon a much
earlier time. The roommate had in fact been quite disturbed, even sui-
cidal; Anna had tried with only partial success to protect and help her. But
the story of the woman in the black coat, who went out into the night, was
Anna’s own: As a teenager, living on her own for the first time, Anna had
put on that coat and gone out alone into the night into a dangerous part of
the city, where she had been held up at gunpoint by a boy who had forced
her against a wall. In terror, she had thought she would be raped or even
killed, but he had taken her purse and that coat and fled. She felt shaken
even by the memory of her terror.
I said that she was telling me about this for the first time and letting
me know in an alive way some of the terrible feelings she had had.
Anna said she was afraid I couldn’t see how she felt.
I said I thought that was a way of backing off from the terrible things
she was feeling and from feeling connected with me, going back to the
disconnected way she had felt.
“We were stuck in the muck before,” Anna said, “but the muck is
safer. That is terrible anxiety I feel in the dream, waiting to hear the story.
Terrible things have happened to me, and I have let them happen. That
seeking out of danger, that self-destructiveness is the flip side of the anger
I’ve felt toward you.”

Comments

This session was different from any we had had for a long time and
reflects, I think, the lifting of the impasse that had held us immobile. It is
key both to the dream Anna reports and to her associations that the dream
establishes, or reestablishes, a frame for the analytic work, one in which
we are making and telling a story that feels true and important, in which
fears and wishes from the past can come alive and become known. We
often speak of the analytic frame in terms of the setting and the arrange-
ments for the analysis, but in a working analysis the frame is also cen-
trally a frame of listening, where the analyst can assume the role of an
early parent who listens to and imagines the patient’s evolving experi-
ence. It is only within this listening frame that the patient can safely per-
mit the unconscious dimension of experience to penetrate awareness and
become known as part of the here and now, yet at the same time as distinct
from it; here the patient can see what happens between analyst and patient

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 Lucy LaFarge

both as real and present and as a transference (LaFarge 2014; Birksted-

Breen 2015).
Recognizing the reestablishment of this listening frame, Anna is now
able to feel hope for the analysis, and to bring a dream through which we
can begin to explore her fantasies and experiences of loss and destructive-
ness. The dream depicts a story in which the loss of Anna’s husband at the
time they divorced (the first scene of the dream) can be understood in part
as the loss of a figure who reassured Anna of her own capacity to love and
be loved and who protected her against fears of destructiveness from
within and without. Her failure to keep the marriage intact has revived for
her old memories of failing to protect others—here the roommate—and
herself as well (the second scene of the dream).
As terrifying memories and fantasies come to light, Anna reinstates
the situation of the impasse—seeing me once again as an uncomprehend-
ing, unempathic listener. However, I am now freer to separate here and
now from fantasy—to see the transference as transference—and I am able
to interpret this retreat as defensive, Anna’s way of warding off both her
own awareness of her feared destructiveness and self-destructiveness and
the meaning of my listening to these things and hearing them. In response
to my interpretation, as the session ends, Anna is able to return to an atti-
tude of analytic exploration, recognizing the anger she has felt toward me
as something that has come from deep inside her and is tied to the long-
standing hatred and cruelty that she has turned upon herself.
The blurring of the figures in the dream, where the woman who goes
out into danger is both Anna herself and her roommate, whose threatened
destruction Anna witnesses, reflects important aspects of the impasse
from which Anna and I are now emerging. Certainly the blurring is con-
nected to Anna’s use of projective identification, to her constant projec-
tion of the figures of a depleted, unprotective mother and a destructive
daughter into me and her own reintrojection of the same figures. At the
same time, the blurring of the two figures has to do, I think, with Anna’s
preconscious awareness of my receptiveness to these projections, her cor-
rect apprehension that my anxieties resonate with her own. Indeed we
both feel damaged, assaulted from within and without, uncertain whether
we can be revived or can revive others, or whether our destructiveness
will prevail. The resonance of these fantasies for both of us has kept us in
a bastion of mutual disappointment. At the same time, as the bastion has

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 The Fog of Disappointment

been resolved, it has become clearer that some areas of fantasy and reality
are shared between us and others are not. It seems likely that the bastion,
with its sense of oneness, has protected both of us not only against feared
object loss and failed reparation, but also against the meaning for both of
us of the aspects of our inner world and external reality that we do not
share; this will be an important theme as the analysis continues.

Conclusion

In the clinical material I have presented, I have tried to show the multiple
meanings that a prolonged, shared sense of disappointment had for me
and my patient Anna. For both of us, disappointment warded off still
more painful states of disillusionment and despair. Anna’s disappoint-
ment set off a cycle of painful affects—shifting states of disappointment,
disillusionment, and despair—that resonated between us and brought the
analytic process to an impasse. To break this cycle and help Anna under-
stand her sense of disappointment, I needed to do considerable work in
the countertransference, to recognize the underlying disillusionment and
despair that were warded off by my own sense of disappointment, and to
trace these painful feelings first to their sources in my personal uncon-
scious and then to their sources in Anna’s transference to me—in the
internal objects she projected into me. My analysis of the two sources of
my countertransference—in my personal unconscious and in the current
analytic process with Anna—allowed me to begin to distinguish between
these two currents and likewise allowed Anna to begin to explore her
painful feelings more freely and to look at their sources in her past uncon-
scious and in the analytic present. Although beyond the range of the mate-
rial reported here, this exploration ultimately led to Anna’s reconstruction
of a specific early memory, of a time when her mother’s acute illness and
hospitalization had triggered her angry withdrawal, the analog of my own
illness during an earlier period of the analysis.
Analytic impasse may be seen as a situation where for both patient
and analyst the two currents of past unconscious and contemporary expe-
rience have for a prolonged period become blurred and are felt to be the
same, and the psychic space between them, which is necessary for ana-
lytic work, has collapsed. In my clinical material, I have shown the way
Anna’s projection of a depleted, damaged maternal object resonated with

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 Lucy LaFarge

my own fantasy of myself as damaged; this blurring led to a situation

where both of us saw Anna’s view of me as damaged as an accurate
perception and prevented the unconscious dimension of Anna’s transfer-
ence from emerging. Seeing myself as damaged in turn, I was unable to
interpret as well as I might have otherwise, and this failure confirmed for
both of us my damaged state.
I will close with a few words about analytic reparation and
disappointment.
It is of note that the disappointment that Anna and I felt, and that
threatened to defeat the analysis, appears to have been linked to a shared
fantasy of the way reparation occurs in analysis. Both of us saw the ana-
lytic situation as a meeting of minds, in which reverie and imagination are
key, where my containing imagination would create a place where Anna’s
own unconscious experience could emerge, become known, and poten-
tially be modified. This idea of analysis as a containing reverie, and of my
analytic role as one in which I both create and represent a frame where
this process can take place, so corresponds to my model of analysis that it
is easy to pass over the recognition that it rests on a specific fantasy. At
least in broad outline and on the surface, this vision of analysis was shared
by Anna, and her view of me as lifeless and unimaginative—a view with
which I identified during the period of impasse—depicted an analyst who
was damaged in this essential analytic function.
Reparation may take many forms in fantasy: we restore our objects
through love and sexual intercourse, through undoing specific damage we
feel we have done to them, through rescuing them from dangerous bad
objects, and in a host of other ways. Any or all of these fantasies may be
actualized for the analyst through her work, and both patient and analyst
may consciously or unconsciously experience disappointment in any of
them. It seems possible that for the patient, and particularly for the ana-
lyst, who holds her model dear, the stubbornness of analytic disappoint-
ment reflects, in addition to the other functions I have described, an
insistence on a specific (analytic) mode of reparation as a defense against
other, more dangerous modes of reparation that are represented for each
in fantasy—of reparation as a meeting of bodies rather than of minds, for
example, or as a masochistic surrender or method of narcissistic appro-
priation. There is a glimpse of such a latent meaning in the second ses-
sion, where Anna conveys the sense that reparation entails sacrifice of the
self for the sake of another. The nature of these multiform fantasies, which

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 The Fog of Disappointment

are concealed beneath analytically sanctioned forms of reparation, would

become known only as the analytic work continued.

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E-mail: llafarge@verizon.net

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