A close examination of a consultation is presented. Such a face-to-face encounter with an adult patient can suggest a parallel with another type of treatment: child analysis. It is argued that certain ways of working with children in analysis—the gliding between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic—were especially useful in bringing this adult patient to engage in analysis. Also highlighted in this account are interventions that function not as interpretations per se but as protointerpretations aimed at arousing preconscious affect states for the purpose of bringing them into conscious experience.
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