Quote #48
My example concerns a young woman patiant who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The Difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably 'geometrical' idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpectedand irrational would turn up, something that burstthe intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with myback to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark roo.This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose colden green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarabe. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words 'Here is your scarab.' This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.