She spent most of her time, after her mother’s death, with her father, who used to speak for her, and often, instead of her. As an adult, she had some romantic relationships, with both men and women, none of which became meaningful to her. She moved between jobs, never sure about what she wanted, never able to speak about the reasons for her choices in life, or their meanings. In our encounters, she used to try and answer my questions, but it always felt as though nothing was said and I could not touch the experiences or access the meanings of her words. Many times, after our sessions, I could not recall what we were talking about and was left wondering about the empty echo of her words in me. Why was it that I could not remember the content of what T was telling me during sessions?
Freud anchors unsettled speech in the unconscious truth behind it, explaining that an ambivalent content manifest itself as disturbed speech, in which ‘two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, have left their traces’ (Freud, 1939: 70). Listening more carefully to the rhythm of T’s language, I could sometimes sense a conflicted struggle when stories came out in constipated bits: begging to say something, stopping in the middle of a sentence, or saying something and then regretting it, as if words were ossified between opposing forces – to be revealed and to be concealed. The ambivalence in her language prevented T’s words from coming together to form a coherent narrative, and the dry tone in which they came out often left me feeling detached, sometimes even bored.