Appendix: The Crux of the Matter
Stephanie Schechter © 2017 All Rights Reserved
stephschechter@aol.com
(Reprinted in Stephanie Schechter (2024) Ethics Education in Psychoanalytic Institutes, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 44:2, 178-193.)
Dr. Jablonski teaches a clinical section of a fellowship class at BPSI. She knows some of her students have limited experience and is not surprised when no one volunteers to be the first to present clinical material. She decides to present her own work for the first class. She chooses to present her work with Ms. Duarte, a patient whom she finds fascinating. Ms. Duarte is a 30-year-old single woman, an attorney who is extremely bright, successful and attractive; she is on track to become a partner at a well-known Boston law firm. Ms. Duarte was raised in a wealthy Venezuelan family which was very religious; her parents insisted she and her sisters attend church and go to confession several times a week. Her father was a judge on the Venezuelan Supreme Court and had numerous adulterous affairs throughout his marriage. Ms. Duarte came to the US to attend Barnard College in New York. She enrolled in a pre-law curriculum and performed well academically. Having had no sexual experience, she began to experiment with numerous partners. Her second year of college, she learned of several women at Barnard who worked for an on-line prostitution service and was surprised to find herself intensely curious. Eventually, she joined the on-line service and had several “dates” with men which involved being paid for sex. She found these experiences exciting and terrifying. After several months, she worried about the negative impact this behavior could have on her life and career and decided to stop. After college and law school, she moved to Boston to accept an associate position at a prestigious firm. Professionally, she performed extremely well and became known as a “rising star” at her firm. However, after a meeting where she thought she recognized an opposing attorney as one of her former “dates,” she had her first panic-attack. She developed intense fear of this episode of her life being revealed, and the panic attacks became severe and frequent. Eventually, she decided to seek psychotherapy. Dr. Jablonski is intrigued with Ms. Duarte and her story and thinks that the class could learn a great deal about the unconscious, internalization, and intrapsychic conflict – much of which they are learning about in the fellowship curriculum. She is also aware of many of her countertransference reactions to Ms. Duarte and feels that she would like to model openness to these dynamics by discussing some of her feelings which have arisen in the treatment. To disguise Ms. Duarte’s identity, Dr. Jablonski gives her a pseudonym and says she is an “immigrant” but does not specify from where. She does not mention Barnard, and merely says she attended a “prestigious university.” She omits that her father is on the Supreme Court but does mention that he was a “powerful judge” because she feels this is relevant to the patient’s intrapsychic conflict. She feels the patient’s career choice is also clinically relevant and says the patient is a lawyer, but nothing more about her work.
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