Nisha, fifty-seven, is trying to figure out her life now that her kids have left the nest. She wants to believe that she has a good relationship with her husband, but when he does not consider her when he makes major decisions she feels depressed and despondent. Other times, when they are with their friends, she gives off an image to others and to herself, that she and her husband are a “good team.” Some days, Nisha is getting divorced and making plans to “get on with her life.” Other days, Nisha is planning romantic trips for her and her husband to go on so that they can celebrate their life together. When I see Nisha and I remind her of her flip-flop, she acts as if she has no memory for the other state. That is, when she is “ready” to divorce her husband, then she wants to talk to me about that. When she is “happy” with her husband, then there is nothing to talk about in that department. When I remind her that it was just “yesterday” that she was thinking about leaving her marriage, she looks at me with a glazed look. She knows that to be true, but she does not want to be confronted with her rapid change of mind. Her defense is such that she shuts one door and opens another, without looking back as to where she came from, or from what happened yesterday. This results in a lack of continuity in her own mind and in the mind of those she confides in. As she is having trouble integrating her conflicting feelings towards her husband, she has compromised with this conflict by adopting what I call “a flip-flop or amnestic approach” to challenging situations. As her therapist, it is my job to create internal continuity, to develop a thread which runs through her mental existence. I need to help her be less amnestic and more narrative about the range of her feelings. Remembering and working through, Freud called this process. Two ideas, so easy to state concisely, so hard to operationalize.
