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In this case commentary, I offered my musings related to what I imagined thinking about if I encountered Colette in psychotherapy, highlighting potential interpersonal dynamics that could infuse the treatment relationship. I explored several clinical issues, including themes of race, repetition of abuse, enactments, working with trauma, and other unconscious dynamics at play in the treatment of traumatized patients. These thoughts were provided from the perspective of a young, White therapist who practices from a relational position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinician's experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation-and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them-with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person's racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Lacanian perspective privileges speech as the motor of cure in the treatment of this borderline patient. In assuming such an ethical position, the clinician fostered a symbolic transference marked by an outburst of rage that signified a rupture of her entanglement with her mother. In this way, the clinician's promotion of 'full speech' breached the patient's defensive need for 'invisibility' and led her to produce a socially useful project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the manner in which psychological treatment, with its attentiveness to the vicissitudes of the unfolding selfobject transference, gradually enabled a patient to contain and articulate painful affect states. The patient's passionate relationship with food, strikingly illustrated in the clinical material, including her dreams, endowed eating with the functions of an idealized selfobject. Over the course of treatment, she seemed to traverse a psychic bridge that took her from an isolated reliance on food through a more focal awareness of her body and her feelings, to an investment in, and capacity for, deepened relationships with other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]