Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Abstract

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a “play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made” (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a “transitional object,” this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and “acting-out” behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to “reparative regressions.”