a sweet sad story about feeling friendly

A patient arrives ten minutes late for a session. She interprets her own lateness as meaning that she didn't want to come to analysis that day. I feel anxious. This fits with her interpretation, on the assumption that I am now feeling what she has been feeling. As she continues to talk, it emerges that she left her house quite early, but then had managed to take a wrong turn along the way. I am beginning to feel friendly and sad beneath the anxiety. I say that it seems to me she very much wished to come to analysis today, as indicated by leaving early, but this wish made her quite anxious. Maybe when she feels especially friendly toward me, she bcomes afraid that her friendly feelings will be rejected. She begins to cry and, after a bit, begins to talk about how she felt she disappointed her mother.

Wolfenstein, Eugene, ‘On the Uses and Abuses of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Research’ (1991) 2(4) Free Associations 515, 517.