...It is 7:45 a.m. Steaming coffee container in hand, standing at my window looking down at the street below, I am waiting for the “buzz” announcing my first patient, the cue that launches me into my chair—my haven, my “nest.” But my gaze is pulled as if by a will of its own, and inevitably submits as it does each morning. There he is! Just as he has been every day for months—in the same doorway next to my Greek luncheonette, half sitting, half sprawling, clutching an empty coffee container holding a few coins, some of them mine. Why must we share the same coffee container? I focus on the blue and white sketch of the Greek amphora and the “personal” greeting in simulated classic lettering: “Its A Pleasure To Serve You.” I think, somewhat irritably, “Get Lost! Its bad enough to see you when Im buying my coffee—do I have to also see you while Im drinking it? I need this time to relax! I have to get ready to help people!” I hear a voice: “Why dont you just stop looking out of the window?” A second voice replies, petulantly: “But its my window!” The first is heard again: “Then why dont you give him something every day instead of just once in a while? Maybe you wont feel so angry at having to see him when you get upstairs.” “But if I do that, hell expect it every day,” the second voice argues. “Hell tell his friends, and then everyone will expect it. Ill have to give to all of them.” “So what!” the first voice proclaims. “But his needs are insatiable,” complains the second voice. “Theres one of him on every corner.” “Have you ever met someone with insatiable needs?” asks the first voice. “I dont think so,” the second voice mutters defeatedly. “I dont think so either,” says the first. “Do you think your patients have insatiable needs? Are you afraid of releasing a demon that will never go back into the bottle and will enslave you?” That did it! I “woke up” and saw myself standing at the window, staring at the man in the doorway across the street. “Do I feel that way with my patients and deny it?” I wondered. “Its a pleasure to serve you, but stay in your bottle? Its a pleasure to serve you for fifty minutes but not to know you personally?” Oh, God, what a way to start the day. Ah, saved by the buzz!... Philip M. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity Of Self And The Psychoanalytic Relationship dev.wawhite.org/uploads/PDF/E1f_5%20Bromberg_P_Standing_in_the_Spaces.pdf
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:20:11 +0000
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