DREAMING ONESELF INTO EXISTENCE

Germaine Leece

APAS Opening Doors Panel Session 2025

On the morning, I was preparing to write this paper, I was driving and listening to a podcast interview with the literary author Katie Kitamura talking about her writing process and her interest in “play”. “When you are with [children] there’s so much role play… playing being a bus driver, a teacher… and … we naturally understand that as a process through which [children] learn about what it means to be in the world and how to construct their identity. The moment you take that into adult life, it is immediately seen as somehow inherently negative… a pretence. But that’s everything about how we have learned to exist in the world.”

I felt a bolt of recognition thinking about the ways I have “played” with finding my psychoanalytic identity. This was particularly true when I moved into a consulting room of my own in March 2024 and began to feel a pretence, which I found quite negative and destabilising. 

Katie Kitamura continued to talk about the “performative aspects of intimate moments in people’s lives” and that you “need an audience… to authenticate the performance you are entering into”. What helped bring my performance to life and be metabolised was the coincidental timing of another candidate renovating his established practice. We began to write to one another daily about the experience of creating and modifying our consulting rooms, and through this correspondence, recognised that we were symbolically creating and modifying our internal analytic rooms. 

Our consulting rooms acted as containers and the objects within became representations for furnishing internal spaces. In her book, House A Mirror of Self, Clare Cooper Marcus (2006) writes about the “personalisation of space” and that it’s the “moveable objects in the home, rather than the physical fabric itself, that are the symbols of self” (p. 8). In thinking and writing about these objects, I began to realise that they were a way to notice and work through my own psychoanalytic development.

What follows is a reflection of the experience of moving from this sensation of playing dress-ups to a process of “dreaming oneself more fully into existence”; Ogden’s (2004) understanding of the dreaming being the psychological work that is needed for change. He also writes about Winnicott and Bion’s work being concerned with playing and dreaming as “growth-promoting living experiences”, which Ogden (2025) believes is a way “of becoming more oneself” (p.5). 

When I became a candidate, I was working as a complex trauma counsellor for an NGO and had never worked in private practice. Realising the logistical need to create a practice but yet to comprehend the psychological need, I moved into a group practice where I shared a furnished consulting room. It was mine in the mornings and another clinicians in the afternoon/evenings. As time went on, I increasingly began to feel that I was not in my own space but in the room of the other therapist. Through supervision and my own analysis, I saw images of myself tip-toeing through the room so as not to make my presence felt or leave a disturbance, yet at the same time feeling frustrated that I had no place of my own.

As the months went on, I became more consciously frustrated about my room situation but also began to understand that unconsciously there had been safety in hiding behind (or in) someone else’s room and not having to make it mine. I was hiding in plain sight, and it was stopping me from deepening my internal analytic frame.

Recognising my part in my “invisibility”, I started looking to move rooms. I needed an empty space to make my own. Finding the room and its requirements (affordable, close to parking and public transport, quiet building, bathrooms) was surprisingly easy. What was surprisingly hard was how to furnish it, thereby bringing myself out of the shadows. I had read an essay in a collection by British author Rachel Cusk (Coventry, 2019) who after divorcing and selling the family home, had re-partnered and rented: “We were both more and less ourselves in that undistinguished space, less burdened but less anchored too; freer and yet unreflected, for nothing there gave us back an image of ourselves.” I recognised myself. While lost amongst others’ artwork and books in my shared room, I felt quite safe, yet not growing. Without dreaming, Ogden (2004) wrote, we can “remain trapped in an endless, unchanging present”. 

In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec (1974) wrote: “What does it mean to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours?” (p.24). I could not work out how to take possession of this space; noticing a paralysis about choosing furniture. I would catch myself thinking, ‘what couch would a real analyst have? What art? What chair?’ I never had this problem furnishing my own home or even my childhood bedroom, and I was curious. I noticed myself talking in analysis about psychoanalysts’ rooms I had seen in the movies and on TV to work out what I wanted to create. 

One day, while driving to analysis, I passed a truck parked outside a house with a sold sign. It belonged to a styling company and they were loading on-trend furniture. I felt sad that going to styled house inspections today never gives you an impression of the real, lived-in home but rather a "standard edition" of one. I also enjoy looking at people's bookshelves and phantasising about who they are based on the books displayed. I feel cold walking into houses with no books. This made me think about the question of including books in my consulting room; I realised there was a transferential reaction both ways. While there was an argument that if you only had “standard editions” of psychoanalytic books on the shelves, patients would learn nothing about you, I wondered about this. If I only had the standard editions of Freud, for example, on my bookshelf, I would feel that I was styling a room so others would know it was the room of an analyst. Not a real analyst, but the standard edition of one. This is the complex situation of being a candidate; I’m not a real analyst, yet having only Freud on the bookshelves would feel like walking around in my mother's high heels when I was a child. 

Henrik Carpelan (1981) wrote, "For the patients, the consulting room represents the interior of the object for which the analyst stands, filled with various part-objects. In unconscious phantasy, all the concrete objects to be seen form parts of the analyst.” Like a newborn baby, I needed to start furnishing my mind with part-objects as a way of containment. While I didn’t want my entire fiction collection on display, I found a desire to have the books that were helping shape me into “becoming” an analyst in my room. Were they to prop up my identity and aid my performance, or were they a transformational object? 

Bollas (1979) explains the transformational object as “an object that is experientially identified by the infant with the process of the alteration of self experience...” (p. 98). He continues to explain that in adult life, the quest is not to possess the object but to recollect an earlier experience that was identified with a metamorphoses of the self. Books had always been a catalyst for personal growth and transformation throughout developmental stages in my life. The first decision I made about my room was about where to put bookshelves, and this symbolised a foundation of control over my environment, a way to begin, in Georges Perec’s words, to take possession of it.

Next, I found a large painting that I loved; a landscape in soft swirls of pale blues, greens and whites. These two objects – the books and painting – anchored me and helped make the other furniture choices. This may have been an experience that “generated hope, even a sense of confidence and vision” (Bollas, 1979). Was it the “aesthetic moment when an individual feels a deep subjective rapport with an object – a painting, a poem, during an opera or symphony, before a landscape – that the person experiences an uncanny fusion with the object, an event that recalls the kind of ego experience which constituted his earliest experiences?” (Bollas, 1978). I believe it was. The painting became my colour palette for other furniture choices: a cream rug with swirls, white side tables, a green armchair, pale wooden lamp bases and white lampshades. 

Indecision returned when choosing a couch, fearing it may look too much like an “analytic couch” and wanting one that looked more like a standard piece of furniture. While my analyst, supervisor and progress advisor all shared their processes about choosing couches, I felt that to “copy” would be further evidence that I was role-playing. I chose an armless, Scandinavian-style beige couch and added three cushions echoing the muted colours in my painting. I now realise it was another way of hiding. It could be an analytic couch or it could be a sofa; I could be an analyst or I could be a psychotherapist. Not one thing or another, which was how I was feeling. Many of my fellow candidates had secured training cases; some their second cases. At this time, I felt I was also role-playing as a psychoanalytic candidate.

The couch also seemed invisible to my patients. Directly opposite the door, I began to resent that it remained unchanged each day; the cushions plump, in the same colour order along the back and a throw blanket placed in a “dressed up” way. It reminded me of preparing a cot before the baby is born; not quite real as it’s yet to be lived in. In those first weeks, none of my patients commented on the couch or asked why it was there. 

I also wondered if my room was non-existent after an experience with three patients whom I had been seeing for a couple of years. All appeared to have no physical room in mind but were in some other space. One was talking about her experiences at home or “out there” in the world and comparing it to “this space”: “what we have done in this space / the things I have worked out in this space” while pointing down to the ground. Only the things she was referring to all happened in the other physical room, not this one.

The next patient referred to his own bedroom as a very private space, like a room in his mind, where no one was welcome and if they entered (family or lovers) he felt very intruded upon. I asked whether he felt intruded upon in this space and he answered that this space felt completely his and I was not an intrusion (helped by the fact that he paid me for a service) but that this was his space to claim. I got the feeling that he was blinded to the physical space and the room was somewhere else in his mind. Or was this further evidence that I was yet to let anyone into my analytic space, as I still had not taken possession of it?

I had been seeing my third patient on zoom for three years. Now that I had moved to a location that she could easily get to, the thought of being in the room terrified her. She liked seeing me as a “2D torso” and felt that she would become too attached to see me “walking around” the room. There was something about being inside the room together that made her feel that this relationship would become “real” and then end. 

I wondered what this said about intimacy and maternal feelings. As a parentified child, would she feel the need to care for me in the room in a way she didn’t feel on screen? What was the connection and transference without the physical room? 

When discussed with my supervisor, the comment was made that the new room is a bit like the new mother who is trying to feel her way into it. The very early transference experience of the mother looking for the baby while the baby is still looking for the breast. They are completely different viewpoints. I was still preparing the analytic mother/environment to allow the baby to grow. I was taken back to my own memories of preparing nurseries for my children and my desire to get the room right. It seems so obvious now, the nursery was helping prepare me for becoming a mother in the same way the consulting room was now helping prepare me for becoming an analyst. 

This was echoed in all my patients’ initial reactions to my room; unanimously commenting on how “calm and warm” it was. I felt anxious, initially believing it was a shallow transference, that I hadn’t reached any depth with them. I now associate this with a comment about my “calmness” made decades ago by a family friend who had known me since childhood. At the time, I was incredibly anxious and shocked she could not see this. She replied, “oh, you’re like a swan, gliding serenely on the surface while underneath paddling like crazy”. The calm room felt like a facade; deep down I was paddling like crazy to do this work.

In the novel, Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan (2024), the main character is an art critic and intellectual who suffers a breakdown. His wife (who happens to be a psychoanalyst) says, “He wanted life to be like an artwork and it never quite is.” After his breakdown, his sister says, “Idealism. It’s an affliction, isn’t it? … I worried that anyone who loved art so much might find ordinary life hard, damaged by the constant need for ideal conditions.” 

Each day, I would return to the “ideal conditions” of the room, everything in its place. I wondered if I had set an ideal stage with props not quite ready to use and this was somehow transmitted to my patients who would gingerly put their keys on the side table, keep phones, hats, cardigans tucked beside them on their chair and only think to look for a tissuebox after their fingers could no longer mop up their tears.

A patient came back after a month away, rushing in late, as usual. She never looked around, her eyes always held mine. She sat in the chair and put her water bottle on the ground, then held out her cardigan which was wet as her bottle had leaked in the car. She scrunched it up in her hands and said, “oh well” while leaving it next to her on the chair. I found myself wanting to offer to hang it up and wondering why she didn’t use the room in any way. Did it feel like a stage to her? Why did the bottle not go on the side table? There were so many ways she did not fully inhabit the room, which was similar to her not fully inhabiting her life.

I began to project this frustration outwards and went from feeling that my room was warm and cosy to seeing it as a stage waiting for others to notice and use. It felt cold and austere, paralleled with a belief that I was cold and austere, unable to produce a training case. I thought again about the ways I was trying to create an “ideal” room in the same way as I tried to create the “ideal” nursery. I started to notice that I cleared my desk, making sure everything was in its place before opening the door for a patient. 

Soon, the room felt quite dead to me; this was also reflected in my practice. I started going through the motions externally while internally I felt chaos and upheaval, a questioning of my understanding of the world and my place in it. The room became a staged space for pretending that everything was normal; it did not feel like an alive space for experiencing the inner world. I wondered if that was reflected in my patients: the ones who never commented on the space and continued to go around and around their internal worlds with little movement; the ones who were travelling overseas and absent; or those wanting to spread sessions further out. It felt like no one was “living” here. Me included. 

However, not everything was invisible. On the cream rug, there was already a discolouration in front of the armchair where patients sat. There were no marks in front of the couch (or in front of my chair). I was spending as many hours with my feet on the rug as my patients, so why was I leaving no impression? I was reminded of my image of tip-toeing through my shared consulting room. My presence as an analyst was as invisible as my couch. Weeks of staring at this unsullied couch led to me feeling more resentful as I continued to notice the darkening marks on the rug by the chair. I wondered whether the discolouration was more pronounced in my mind, reminding me that the work was only happening in the chair and perhaps I was unconsciously keeping it there. 

Reality finally entered the room in the form of multiple little fruit flies that began emerging from the pot plants and flew in front of my face most sessions. Something real had cut through my stage set and, as I swatted them away, I realised I was in possession of a living and breathing room. I thought about how often my analyst had mentioned that I must struggle with her “messy” room as I continued to idealise mine. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, her room felt lived in and real. Mine was still a staged room of an unborn analyst. However, the fruit flies set something in motion; my room began to get messier. The piles of readings and books on my desk stopped getting cleared away before sessions, and I was shocked to “forget” to remove a coffee cup one morning. Finally, I noticed that I was beginning to leave a mark on the rug. 

Patients also started living in the room. They began adjusting and reconfiguring cushions on the armchair. After two months in this chair with the same cushions, one suddenly said, ‘oh, you have cushions now!’; another started hugging one each session. One began using my coat rack rather than leaving her jacket next to her on the chair and commented that she was only just starting to notice things in the room. There was also the patient who complained of a back injury and when I said to adjust the cushions, he looked at the couch rather than those on the chair, and said “oh no, it’s fine, it will be much better for me to sit up”. It was the first movement towards lying on an analytic couch (and the complete rejection of it!). 

Birksted-Breen (2016) wrote that “particular moments in life require change if they are to be lived, not just gone through”. She refers to early parenthood as one such time that “internal object relationships and identifications need to be reworked and modified” (p.2.). I began to see the ways my internal analytic room was continually being reworked and modified through my curiosity about this external space. Returning to Georges Perec’s question, when does a space become truly yours, I would argue when it’s lived internally and externally. Today, as I continue to notice the darkening rug under my feet, I begin to see myself coming into existence.

Bibliography

Biles, A (Host). (2025 July 25) ‘Katie Kitamara on Fiction’s Shifting Realities’, The Shakespeare and Company Interview, Shakespeare and Company 

Birksted-Breen, D. (2016) The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind, Routledge 

Bollas, C. (1979) The Transformational Object: Int. J. Psychoanal., (60):97-107

Carpelan, H. (1981) On the Importance of the Setting in the Psychoanalytic Situation, Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 4:151-160

Cooper Marcus, C. (2006) House As A Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, Nicolas-Hays, Inc

Cusk, R. (2019) Coventry: Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Perec, G. (2008) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Classics

Ogden, T. (2025) What Alive Means, Routledge

Ogden, T. (2018) How I Talk With My Patients: Int. J. Psychoanal. Q., (87)(3): 399-413

O’Hagan, A. (2024) Caledonian Road, Faber