Off the Couch,into the Toilet

Toilets and Secret(ion)s: The Case of Mr. D.

Among children the acquisition of bowel and bladder control is a major developmental achievement. It is well recognized that the struggle for control and the aggression it generates, whether expressed or inhibited, is an important dynamic during the anal phase. The young child enjoys control over his sphincter: defecation thus not infrequently becomes the battleground for struggles between parent and child.

Because both urination and defecation expose the child to an empowering experience of “holding in,” they also function as basic models of concealment: holding on to the feces affords control not only because the child does not let go, but also because he can conceal from the other when he might do so. This is a somatic experience of concealing what is felt to be “inside” the self from the object. The experience of sphincter control is thus one of the earliest somatic manifestations of keeping something secret. Kulish (2002) has indeed drawn attention to how the word secret is related to secretions; she suggests that “toilet functions become the basis for the earliest communications around secrets” (p. 153).

Secrets and lies are developmentally necessary. In normal development the child’s realization that he can choose to not disclose a thought, fantasy, or feeling heralds the birth of an awareness of inner life as distinct from the outer world and that it is possible to separate private space from public, shared space. Indeed, the child’s first lie represents a momentous step into separateness and autonomy. At the other end of the spectrum, secrets can be used more destructively—to arouse, control, or triumph over the other. If the child’s experience of the body and its secretions, which brings with it a need for increasing autonomy and privacy, is not respected but rather is met with intrusive interest by the object, this may create an erotically charged relationship to feces and urine, and to the physical space occupied by the toilet.

From an analytic point of view, what is significant about the analyst’s toilet specifically is that the patient imagines, or indeed knows, that the analyst also uses this physical space. It is a space within which the analyst’s body can be imagined as exposed and quite literally naked. In other words, this particular toilet is like no other toilet because the patient may feel that it houses the analyst’s secrets. In the minds of some patients, the “toilet used also by the analyst” may be converted into a “toilet shared with the analyst,” fueling sexual and sometimes specifically voyeuristic fantasies, as happened in the analysis of Mr. D.

Mr. D. came into a five-times-weekly analysis in his late twenties. He was a young man who struggled with intimacy. He was troubled by his sexuality and generally by his incapacity to function as an adult: he could not sustain a sexually intimate relationship or regular employment and had very few friends. He managed an analysis only because he paid a very reduced fee.

As a young adolescent—I say “young” because despite his age when he began analysis, Mr. D. was still very much negotiating an adolescent process (Waddell 2002)—he had a breakdown, which required admission, and this had disrupted his education and peer relationships. He felt this had “marked” him as different to his peers, and he carried within him a sense of shame that was consciously related to the experience of being “sectioned” under the Mental Health Code and hospitalized. He was highly sensitive to being looked down on and disapproved of by others.

From the very start of the analysis, Mr. D.’s bowel functions featured prominently. He discussed his struggle with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and the alternation between diarrhea and constipation. As a child, he recalled, he had frequently been constipated, and his mother had been quite worried. He was fully toilet trained by the age of three. His mother had told him that around that age she had discovered him several times in the bathroom defecating on the toilet floor, examining his stool. She said that she had never been angry with him about this, despite the mess he had made. His father, she had told him, had been much more troubled by this behavior and would be cross with him about it.

Mr. D. said he had no recollection of any of this, but he told me that his mother often brought it up in a way that made him feel uncomfortable, just as he had found it uncomfortable when she used to enter the toilet unannounced when he was a teenager. In the analysis we discussed in detail his experience of his mother’s intrusiveness, especially into his body.

Mr. D. presented with a host of somatic complaints and anxieties about his body and its functioning. I was aware, however, that he discussed his bodily functions with an attention to detail that was excessive, as if he needed to fill me with images and smells of his bodily waste, which he experienced as exciting. From early on in the analysis I thus had a very direct experience of how intrusive he could be.

As Mr. D. recounted his mother’s narrative about his interest in his stool (or at least, I should say, what he had made of her narrative in his mind), I was struck by the pleasure he appeared to experience despite consciously asserting that he had felt uncomfortable about her intrusiveness. He lingered on the detail of his stool and on his speculations of what his little boy self might have been searching for. His retrospective speculations about what he might have feared and/or hoped he might have found in his stool rang hollow, even if they might have been correct, but between us they had a masturbatory quality. I felt I was somehow being invited into an enactment of the sexually charged relationship he had experienced with his mother. Now it was I being invited into the toilet by him, looking at his stool as he looked at it, and then looking at him masturbating over it.

As I listened to him over many months it seemed important to take note not only of his more perverse invitation to be the voyeur, but also to keep in mind how in a very fundamental sense Mr. D. felt there was no private space within which he could hide from his object and develop a sense of privacy at a basic bodily level. In other words, I was concerned to stay focused both on the perverse nature of his fantasies and how he related to me and on the fact that Mr. D. lacked any sense that even his fantasies could be kept secret from his object: the toilet / his mind was a public space where he was always watched and now, in a perverse identification with an intrusive object, he wanted to be watched by me and to look at me.

Following is an excerpt from a session that took place in the second year of Mr. D.’s analysis, at a time when his actual use of my toilet became the focus of our work. When Mr. D. arrived for his session and I opened the door to the consulting room, he announced, as he often did, that he needed to use the toilet—“your toilet,” he called it. It was clear, as it had been on other occasions, that he wanted me to know that he was going into my toilet and, I think, wanted me to imagine him doing so.

As I waited for him I was aware of two feelings: irritation and a wish to distance myself from him. The irritation, I think, was connected with the somewhat obsessional nature of this activity and the hostility it barely disguised: this had become a ritual. My wish to distance myself was more directly connected with the perverse nature of this ritual, in which I felt I was being invited to be the voyeur.

When Mr. D. eventually reclined on the couch, he began by telling me that he had finally booked his holiday, thanks to his parents’ agreeing to pay for it. He would be joining them for a week abroad. He had not traveled for a long time and felt a bit apprehensive about this. He disliked the security procedures at airports, especially the body searches.

I sensed a degree of genuine discomfort as he described the anticipated body search, as if this thought had indeed mobilized anxiety about being exposed in some way—he was not, at this point, aroused by it. However, he then quickly laughed and said that perhaps some people would get a “kick out of this” because, after all, it was a way of “getting touched up” and of “touching up.” He said he had read about the body scanning machines that were being talked about (but were not yet being used widely), and he imagined how it might feel to know someone could see your body, naked, in a public space like an airport. He laughed again, saying that this might make the boring routine job of being a security officer more appealing, as this was a kind of publicly sanctioned “peep show.” This train of associations eventually led to his frequent use of pornography and to “dirty old men,” from whom he wished to distinguish himself because he did not want “to cut a pathetic figure.” He felt very self-conscious about his use of porn, and of prostitutes, because he felt this might lead people to see him as inadequate.

As he spoke I sensed that he had by now become quite excited and had thus successfully extinguished the twinge of anxiety I had detected at the start of the session. The sexualization of anxiety was a primary mode of defense for him, as it is in perversions generally (Freud 1919, 1927). Eventually I said that despite his excitement right now, he had begun the session by voicing some anxiety at the thought of being exposed in public, where people might see the “dirty old man” he feared he was, but that this quickly gave way to “getting a kick out of” being both looked at naked and being himself a spectator at this peep show.

Mr. D. said I “couldn’t take a joke,” that he had just been having fun with his speculations. I always read too much into everything, he added, somewhat triumphantly it seemed.

I said he was enjoying exposing me as someone who can’t take a joke. Now I was the one who “cut a pathetic figure.”

Mr. D. eventually said that two nights ago he had had a wet dream. He couldn’t remember what the dream was about, but when he woke in the morning and noticed the wet on his bedsheet, it had reminded him of when he had been enuretic between the ages of eight and thirteen. His father had been “very tough” on him about that, establishing the rule that if he wet the bed he had to change his own sheets. By contrast, his mother “rescued” him from this and would not only help him change the sheets but would comfort him, hold him in her arms, and reassure him that one day he would no longer wet the bed. He could not recall what he really felt about the bed-wetting, but he was clear that he felt humiliated by his father and hated him in those moments, much preferring his mother’s seemingly more tolerant and supportive response.

He then said that he had also told his mother about his wet dream. She had reassured him that this was “normal,” but she had suggested that it was a sign that he was sexually frustrated. He said he felt very humiliated by his inability to have a sexual relationship, that he knew he was not attractive to women. As he spoke, it was clear that this was a sore point, and in the session it was the first point of contact with his very real pain, apart from his fleeting anxiety at the start.

As I listened to Mr. D. I was struck by how he invited his mother to get into his wet sheets with him, as it were, and how she allegedly obliged. I was mindful by then of the traps one can readily fall into with a patient like Mr. D.; through my interventions I could become a version of his sexually excited mother intruding into his body and mind under the guise of so-called understanding. I thus chose to say nothing at this juncture and simply see where his associations led him.

Mr. D. become temporarily silent, which was unusual for him at this stage of the analysis. When he resumed speaking, he said that when he had gone to the toilet before coming into the session he had noticed that there was some “wet” on the floor. He had wondered if it was urine or water. He thought it had been me and that it was probably urine. He thought this because it also “smelt bad” in the toilet, so he reasoned that I must have used it, and not just to wash my hands. As he spoke, Mr. D. sounded smug, as if he knew with absolute certainty what I had done in the toilet; he had conveniently obliterated from his mind the existence of any patient other than himself in my toilet/mind.

I said he was very certain that he knew exactly what went on in the toilet and that this made him feel powerful. He replied that he often wondered what went on in toilets. He felt his own life revolved so much around toilets because of the IBS. He said he had felt very reassured when I had shown him where the toilet was after our very first session. He had been anxious about whether I had one, because he might need to use it urgently if he had diarrhea. He had once been to see a therapist who had no toilet. He added that this had outraged him: how could a therapist offer to see a patient and not provide a toilet! He could see that the only way the therapist could have provided one would have been to let the patients go through his house, and he considered that that was precisely what he should have done.

I said he seemed outraged at the possibility of people closing the door on him, not letting him into their private space when he wished to enter. It was so outrageous that with me he created a toilet space in his mind where he could always see me. To this he replied that he could never have seen that other therapist even once a week. The anxiety about not being able to rush to the toilet in the middle of a session should he need it would have been overwhelming. At least here he did not have to worry about that, and it made the whole experience of analysis possible.

I said that the toilet was an important space for him because he could rush to it either actually or in his mind whenever he was anxious and needed to make himself feel better by getting excited at what presumably he could find out about me.

Mr. D. said, “Well, it’s reassuring to know that however bad I feel about myself, everybody shits, including you!”

I said that perhaps what helped him with his bad feeling about himself was getting a kick out of his fantasy of me in the toilet, feeling we were both the same: made up of shit.

Mr. D. laughed, nervously I thought. He hesitated and then said in a rather broken-up voice, as if he wanted to cover up the words as he spoke, that he had sexual fantasies about people defecating on him. After he said this, he started to twitch uncomfortably on the couch. I had the impression that he felt he had exposed himself by revealing this fantasy for the very first time and feared my judgment. This had made him anxious, not aroused like he had been earlier when he thought of me in the toilet. I shared this observation with him.

He said he had been worried about telling me for a long time, because at some level he knew this was disgusting, but he couldn’t help it. He did not want me, or anyone else, to see him as a “lonely sexual freak.” He had wondered many times if he could find a prostitute who would do this to him, but had always been too shy to ask, even when he had frequented prostitutes.

I will not go further into this session. Suffice it to say that what eventually emerged over subsequent sessions were his fantasies of me defecating on him and that these were aroused in particular when he used my toilet. Tracking and analyzing his use of my toilet to fuel the omnipotent fantasy that there were no boundaries between us, and that he could access the contents of my body whenever he wished, became a focus in the analysis. Importantly, this lay the groundwork for helping Mr. D. become aware of his need for privacy and the need to respect that of others.

Over time, and through his use of my toilet concretely and in fantasy, we were able to approach his fantasies about me entering the toilet without asking and him entering it without asking me. This became more marked around breaks, as if separation from me could be managed only by imagining himself connected with me in a perpetual sex orgy located in my toilet.

I have been referring here, of course, to conscious sexual fantasies that were nevertheless underpinned by unconscious fantasies related to his omnipotent takeover of the object and appropriation of the insides of the maternal body. Mr. D. had managed to turn the passive experience of being intruded on by his mother into a sexually exciting one in which he was now in control. Through the transference we came to understand how he both resented his mother’s intrusiveness into his body and mind and yet also longed to be right inside her and to feel she was right inside him. However suffocating at one level, the inside of the maternal body was felt to be a better place to be because inside he was spared the humiliating experience of being a lonely sexual freak. Importantly, when inside the object, he did not have to experience any separation.

The libidinal value of both feces and urine was clearly outlined by Freud (1905) and was strikingly apparent in the content of Mr. D.’s sexual fantasies. We might say that Mr. D. inhabited an anal-sadistic universe “in which all particles are equal and interchangeable” (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1983, p. 295) and that abolishes the genital universe of differences—the very essence of perversion.

In a very interesting paper Clark Nunes (2006) discusses patients who on the surface appear to be similar to Mr. D. insofar as they too have an erotized relationship to their excretions. She describes an incident in the analysis when her patient sees used toilet paper and concludes that it must have been used by the analyst, which left the analyst feeling intruded on. She argues persuasively that such individuals display a particular kind of character formation predicated on the denial of dependency on the object and with marked aggression born of the hatred of dependency. Although Clark Nunes does not ignore the likely impact of later external impingements on her patient’s development, she nevertheless emphasizes his “very early aversion to the object”; yet it is unclear whether she might consider this to have some constitutional basis.

My experience with Mr. D., however, leads me to consider an alternative pathway that nonetheless converges at a symptomatic level with Clark Nunes’s observations in relation to the anal and urethral erotism that does not undergo the more typical repression after the polymorphous perversity of early childhood (Freud 1905). In Mr. D.’s case his feces and urine remained highly erotized as a defense not against dependency on the object but against its loss. I understood this to be due to the early colonization of his body and its products by the maternal object, who seemingly had used him as a narcissistic extension of herself (Glasser 1992) and whose loss was felt by Mr. D. to herald an internal catastrophe. His way of defending against this was to get right inside the object, into its feces and urine, and to smell its odor as a way of penetrating to its core, as he tried to do with me through his fantasies about my toilet and my use of it. In the transference it was possible to discern how the absence of a physical and psychic boundary between him and his primary object had contributed to an excited, erotized relationship with the toilet, a situation in which he alternated between fantasizing about me looking at him and him taking up the position of voyeur.

The Analyst’s Toilet Qua Toilet-Breast: The Case of Ms. C.

Let us now turn from patients like Mr. D., who enact their perverse fantasies and dynamics through the way they use the analyst’s toilet, to consider a quite different use of the toilet. I have in mind here how the analyst’s toilet may be used to enact relational dynamics that cannot yet be brought directly into the consulting room and hence into the analytic relationship. In these cases the toilet becomes quite concretely the location of the “toilet-breast” (Meltzer 1967), a means of preserving a more idealized relationship with the analyst, as is seen in my work with Ms. C., whose initial avoidance of the toilet, and later her actual use of it, reflected her marked struggle with the expression of hostility toward the object and with the accompanying fear of retaliation.

Meltzer (1967) understood the toilet-breast to be the most primitive representation of the mother. More specifically, he was referring to a part-object relationship defined by the “quality of being valued and needed, but not loved” (p. 20). For some patients the analyst’s toilet as a concrete physical space functions as a toilet-breast where the patient literally dumps split-off aggression in order to preserve a good relationship with the analyst as the feeding breast. This denotes a more paranoid-schizoid use of the toilet per se and is a twist on what Meltzer described as the toilet-breast, as what he had in mind was how for some patients “the analyst is in effect only a toilet” (p. 20) and all goodness is felt to come from other people in the patient’s life.

I am suggesting that for some patients there is an even earlier psychic step that results in evacuation of the patient’s shitty or dirty or leaking feelings and is reserved for the toilet qua toilet. Here the toilet by virtue of its nature as part of the analytic setting, and yet sufficiently separated from the consulting room, provides a safe boundary protecting the “good” relationship with the feeding analyst. Indeed, though I am referring here to an actual toilet, Meltzer’s understanding of the function of the underlying primary splitting process remains quite apt: “The reason for the rigidity of this splitting is clearly to be seen when the split begins to break down and the severe anxieties of soiling, polluting and poisoning the feeding breast become so clear” (p. 20).

Ms. C., a woman in her late thirties, was one of two sisters. Her mother was described as a caring, but emotionally needy woman, toward whom, it soon became clear in the transference, Ms. C. had been anxiously attached. She described a childhood dedicated to pleasing her mother and effectively becoming her confidante, as the mother had a difficult marriage and had been experienced by Ms. C. as having turned away from the father. Her sister was described as “wayward” and more defiant toward their mother and father. Ms. C. had a close relationship with her but felt that her sister left it to her to take care of both parents.

By contrast, Ms. C. had become the model daughter, succeeding academically, marrying the kind of man her mother approved of, and soon starting her own family, to which she was devoted. All this was achieved at considerable cost to her development as a separate individual with her own needs and desires. She reported difficulty with sexual intimacy, saying she loved her husband but found it hard to be close to him. She had friends but sometimes felt exploited by them, and yet she was careful not to be critical of them.

By the time she started three-times-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy with me, Ms. C. was depressed. She had started a course of academic study as a mature student, but had interrupted it at midpoint because she felt unable to concentrate. It seemed she could not allow herself any kind of pleasure for very long, a pattern that was apparent in her relationship to food. Bulimic as an adolescent, she would binge but could never keep in the food she had eaten, guiltily vomiting it up no sooner than she had ingested it. When I met her she was not actively bingeing and purging, but she was very conscious about how much she ate and carefully avoided anything that could be construed as indulgent excess.

In the transference, I experienced her as very keen to please me: she invariably agreed with what I said and regularly thanked me for the help I offered her, even when it was clear to me that she was not feeling any better or when I was aware that what I had said was not in fact quite right. I felt she always had to steer herself very close to where she thought I needed her to be. Attempts to take up the negative transference were met with a wall: she would concede that unconsciously she might feel angry, but that really she was not aware of any such feelings toward me. Aggression toward others too was similarly dismissed or played down: anger was always translated into “mild irritation” at most. She worried a lot if she did betray more than irritation, concerned that others would withdraw their friendship or love. It was through my countertransference of often feeling irritated and stifled by her accommodating surface that I gained a sense of the rage she had to desperately split off.

One of the things I noticed only after the first year of the therapy was that Ms. C. had never once used the consulting room toilet. This made her stand out from my other patients, all of whom had used the toilet at least once and some of whom, like Mr. D., had intrusively appropriated it.

One day toward the end of the second year of our work, Ms. C. arrived late and flustered. She hated being late, something we had discussed on other occasions, because she feared I would read this as her being disrespectful and ungrateful. I had taken up many times on such occasions how she became anxious whenever the possibility of any aggression toward me reared its head, or indeed the possibility that I might feel irritated with her. Both possibilities had to be strongly defended against. I sensed how imperative it was for her to protect our relationship from any conflict.

On this occasion her lateness had meant, however, that she had not been able to go into the café near my consulting room to use the toilet before the session. I was taken aback by this revelation, as I had not known about this routine.

Eventually I said that I was intrigued by what had made it impossible for the past two years for her to use my toilet. Ms. C.’s response was as striking as her revelation: she said she had not known I had a toilet she could use; she thought there was no toilet.

As I heard this I began to question whether I had in fact told her. Usually once we agree to work together, I show patients where they can wait and where the toilet is located. It was, of course, possible that I had not done so with Ms. C., but I thought that unlikely because doing it was such a well-established routine with new patients. It seemed more likely that I had done it and that she had not taken my directions in for very specific psychic reasons.

I eventually said that I thought I had mentioned it, but that even assuming I hadn’t, she might have asked me and yet even that had evidently felt impossible for her. Ms C. replied that it was indeed odd when I put it that way. She thought now that it was remarkable that she had never asked because it had been something of an inconvenience to have to use the café all the time, as she felt she always had to have a drink before the session in order to “legitimize” her use of their toilet. But because she would have the drink, by the time the session ended she would need to use the toilet again. And because she felt too embarrassed to return to the café, she often ended up driving home desperate to get back so she could use her own toilet.

I remarked that a lot of emotional and physical energy had been invested in sustaining a toilet routine that did not require using mine, as if that option was out of bounds. It was only at this point that Ms. C. told me that ever since childhood she had been very particular about which toilets she used. She could never sit down on the toilet unless it was in her own home. She hated public toilets because she thought they were dirty. She was a very clean person, she added, and although she was “not obsessional,” she liked all her spaces at home to be clean. I said that despite her hatred of public toilets, using the café’s had been preferable to using mine.

Ms. C. acknowledged that this was indeed a paradox and that the thought of using my toilet left her feeling very anxious. Toilets were “private” places, she added. She never liked using other people’s toilets. She feared picking up germs and getting ill. She was not sure why she had found it so difficult to take in that I even had a toilet, and then to use it, as she imagined my toilet would be clean. But, she added, she would need to do so today because she was desperate. She then went on to recount an incident with a friend; though it had clearly upset her, she could not allow herself to voice any criticism of the friend. The session ended on this note.

After the protracted period of phobic avoidance of my toilet, Ms. C. did indeed use the toilet that day for the first time in almost two years. After she left, and before my next patient arrived, I went to use the toilet myself and discovered that the toilet seat was covered in urine, the floor around the toilet was wet, and the tap in the sink had not been turned off properly. I was thus very concretely exposed to a rather different Ms. C. Here was not the polite, grateful, contained, and “clean” Ms. C. but a more messy, angry part of Ms. C. that had now literally leaked out and was left for me to see and—significantly, I thought—to clean up. I noted that I felt somewhat “put upon.”

In her next session, two days later, Ms. C. made no conscious reference to her use of my toilet. I tried to listen carefully to her associations to see if they might lead us back to the toilet and what she had left there for me to see and clean up, but I could not find an entry point that would allow me to make a link. I was mindful too that I seemed to need to find that entry point, as if it had become imperative that I make the interpretation—as a way perhaps of ridding myself of intolerable feelings. I therefore decided to stay quiet and reflect on my countertransference: a sense of being forcefully exposed to a dirty toilet that I had to clean up and that she had completely dissociated herself from, making it impossible for me to reflect on it with her. She had spent two years protecting me from her aggression, and had phobically avoided my toilet, where she felt she would have exposed her “germs,” which I might have “picked up,” and so damaged our “good” relationship. Now she had given me a clear measure of her aggression but had split it off very concretely and left it in the toilet. I understood this to suggest the activation of anxieties about damage to the “good” object and about an anticipated retaliation, anxieties that could be managed only through marked splitting.

On reflection I decided that if I brought all this into the transference too soon, it might backfire, given how entrenched her defenses were. I would also risk shaming her. It might be important instead, I thought, to let her use the actual toilet as a toilet breast; there she could deposit her hostility and build up confidence in the toilet as an initial container before coming to use me as a toilet-breast. This was itself a development relative to her phobic avoidance of the toilet. I therefore decided to say nothing about it.

In the subsequent months Ms. C. used the toilet on several other occasions. Every time, she left it in the same state, and occasionally worse. I gained the impression that as time passed, and as she did not experience any retaliation on my part, the toilet functioned as an increasingly safe container for what she had not yet been able to think about with me. I saw my role as ensuring that this concrete container could function as such by not interpreting it prematurely. And so it went for about eight months.

Then, in the first session of the week, toward the latter part of the third year of her therapy, it seemed to me that the material she brought invited an interpretation that would allow us to move toward integrating the toilet and its contents into our relationship.

Ms. C. started this session by recounting a rather difficult weekend with her husband. They had decided to have a weekend away, alone without the children. She had been dreading this weekend because she now recognized that the children provided an “acceptable screen,” as she put it, for the distance that had been increasing between her husband and her. As she had feared, no sooner had they reached their hotel than the tension mounted: her husband wanted to make love, but she was not keen. He became upset and started to question the marriage and whether it could continue on this basis. She described her rising panic as her husband spoke. Finally she “gave in” to making love, which they did, but later her husband had told her that he was fed up with her “avoidance tactics” and that he was not sure the therapy had done much to help her change. This had incensed her, she said, because she felt the therapy had helped her a lot.

I said that she was filled with a range of feelings that she had spent many years avoiding between us: any anger or dissatisfaction had to be covered up behind an “acceptable screen.” She would sooner make love with her husband, even if she did not feel like it, or tell me how helpful the therapy was, in order to keep things nice between us, than own up to what she really felt.

Ms. C. said that the therapy had helped her in this respect: she was now able to hear what her husband was saying and she had become upset in front of him like she had never done before. He had been a bit shocked, she said, because she was generally so contained. As she spoke I sensed that she was brittle and almost too insistent about how helpful the therapy had been.

I said that she had been very contained with me too, but that she had indeed started to show me as well what she really felt, “once removed,” in my toilet, where she left traces of a messier, more uncontained part of her.

Ms. C. seemed taken aback and said she was not clear what I meant. I said she might perhaps not be aware of this, and might find it hard to hear me say it, but when she uses my toilet she always leaves the seat and the floor covered in urine and sometimes leaves the tap running too, which seems so at odds with the image of herself she wanted to impress on me to keep our relationship clean and nice.

Ms. C. was silent, and her body on the couch stiffened. She said she felt utterly embarrassed and was not sure she could ever look me in the face again.

I said that taking down that “acceptable screen” left her feeling exposed to my scrutiny of her less acceptable feelings, which she had struggled so hard to keep out of our relationship. I acknowledged how dangerous it might now feel between us.

At first Ms. C. was silent. Then she got up and without looking at me left the room. I immediately felt I had made a mistake in bringing this up, that it had been too soon or that I had done it insensitively. I thought she was leaving altogether, but then realized that she had left her bag and that she had gone to the toilet, where she stayed for five minutes. When she returned, she said I would probably want to know what she had been doing, and she was going to tell me rather than have me discover it: she had thrown up. She then added in a shaken up but also irritated voice: “Maybe I left some mess but I did my best to clean up.”

I said she had felt reprimanded and exposed by me when I brought up the toilet and what she did in it. I said she appeared to be anxious but also angry. Ms. C. replied that she was not angry; she just felt sick. She had felt sick during the night too; it must be some stomach virus. She said, uncomfortably, that she had had diarrhea during the night too, and it had in fact been touch and go if she would make it to the session today. I said that might well be so, but that I couldn’t help thinking that the feelings I had generated in her today by bringing up the toilet, and her angry feelings toward me, had also been hard to keep inside her and to reflect on with me; instead she got rid of them in the toilet again.

After she left I went to the toilet and was immediately hit by a strong odor. I wondered whether she had in fact vomited or had had diarrhea, and if so why she had not felt able to say as much. Ms. C. canceled the next two sessions due to the alleged stomach virus. Although I was sorry she felt the need to do so, I was also encouraged that she felt she could, as this was a way of communicating that things between us were not all right. She had never before canceled a session.

After her return the following week, the tenor of the sessions for several weeks was more distant and critical. She began to question the therapy and whether we might have gotten as far as we could go. She denied that this had anything to do with my making a link between the toilet and us. She said she felt the therapy had helped her complete her studies, that she got on better with her mother and was able to set clearer boundaries, and that generally she felt less stressed.

All of this was true, but it was clear to me at least that her thoughts about ending were directly connected with how dangerous the therapy had become now that there was a live conflict between us and the toilet no longer provided a safe container, as my interpretation had exposed what she did with it. I wondered of course if I had done the right thing by taking this up and whether I had enacted a scenario in which I pushed Ms. C. out of my mind/toilet and she no longer had a safe place to hide. On balance, however, I thought that had I not done so I would have been colluding with a defense, which, while necessary at first, required understanding if Ms. C. was to integrate her aggression more effectively and bring it into the room, as it were.

Ms. C. did manage to stay in the therapy. Over the subsequent months the work became very difficult, but more alive, as she started to use me as the toilet-breast. She became more overtly critical, and though this gave rise to anxiety it felt more manageable. She continued to use the toilet, but I noted that it was not left in a mess as before. Around this time she developed a new friendship with a woman she had met at a social event, and this friend became her new confidante (her feeding breast). This made it possible, I thought, to bring into our relationship her resentment and anger.

At the start of the fourth year of the therapy, Ms. C. brought in an anxious dream: There was a tsunami and she looked on as a small woman desperately tried to cling to some railings to avoid being washed away by the tide, but the tsunami swept her away. In her associations she remarked that she had been horrified by how unforgiving “nature” can be. We were able to use this dream to approach not only how frightened she was that her “nature,” which she now knew contained some very powerful feelings she experienced as dangerous, might kill me, but also that I might retaliate and be unforgiving toward her for now hating me. It was of note that the dream image is of water killing a small woman, a detail that made me think about the earlier use of Ms. C.’s urine in the toilet: her wish for it to submerge me and a corresponding fear that it would.

In this same session an interesting train of thought prompted by the word nature, which had appeared in her dream, led Ms. C. to tell me that her mother had never been at ease with anything “too natural.” She said that when her children were babies her mother never helped out with changing them, and Ms. C. thought that this was because at some level her mother felt disgusted by the smell of dirty nappies. She recalled her mother saying that she had not enjoyed nappy changing when Ms. C. and her sister were babies and had delegated this “task” to a nanny.

Ms. C. added that she had never had that problem with any odor produced by her children, but she was always worried about leaving a foul smell behind if she used somebody else’s toilet. She acknowledged that this was one reason she still felt uncomfortable using my toilet, even though she now felt she could. She said that many months previously she had used it when she felt unwell, and she knew she had left a smell. She had been put out by the fact that I did not provide air freshener. On that day she had forgotten the perfume she typically carried in her handbag; otherwise she would have used it to cover the smell. As she related this to me, I sensed that she had become agitated.

I said that she really could not trust that I could bear her “bad” smells and that these had to be covered over. But I also wondered aloud what she had made of the fact that I did not provide air freshener.

Ms. C. was quiet at first and then said that although she had felt angry with me about the lack of air freshener at the time, she had later thought that this must be because I was not bothered by this kind of stuff and she had rather envied me for being relaxed about it. There was something about body odor and smells coming from her body waste that she found especially difficult—she still did not feel, for example, that she could “let out air” in front of her mother or husband. Or here with me, I added.

Ms. C. agreed and said she wanted to protect me from these “foul” parts of herself. As she spoke, I felt she was much more connected with depressive anxieties about the damage her aggression might cause me. I also sensed her longing that I could relate to her as a whole person with both “foul” and good parts.

The question of smell, and whether I could tolerate the smells coming from her body, provided an important opportunity for approaching Ms. C.’s early experience of an object that could not accept her as she was. It seemed as if she felt that her mother could not tolerate her smelly, less “nice” parts and related only to her “clean,” accommodating self, which she had perfected over the years, eventually becoming the model daughter.

For patients like Ms. C., the use of the analyst’s toilet may be phobically avoided at first, but its eventual use may provide the first prototype of a safe container for feelings and parts of the self felt to be dangerous or unacceptable. Once this can become more integrated into the analytic relationship, it becomes possible to edge toward the analyst’s being safely used as a toilet-breast until a more depressive integration of the good and the bad object can be consolidated. As Meltzer (1967) wrote,

Only with the establishment of the toilet-breast as an object in psychic reality through the repeated experience of it externally in the transference, is the relinquishment of massive projective identification possible, since this mechanism aims at escaping from an unbearable infantile identity. Once this separate identity has thus been made bearable through the modulation of pain, the way is opened for other developmental steps [p. 21].

Ms. C.’s experience of an object that refused to take in the smells of her body was felt to be a profound rejection of the most basic aspects of her self. In normal development the shared experience of smell, of smelling the other and of being smelled by the other, represents one of the earliest somatic prototypes of introjection and projection. An object that cannot receive the baby’s bodily smells is an object that cannot function as a receptive olfactory container. This may lead to a need to split off parts of the self that are felt to be smelly or dirty in order to preserve a more idealized relationship with an object who is presented only the clean parts of the self.

Ms. C., as I came to understand over time, had no internal model of olfactory intimacy. My work with her reminded me of the developmental necessity for the baby to feel that the object is prepared to enter, without intrusion, the intimate physical space between them, and is able to breathe and smell the baby and so receive its bodily projections and, as we might put it in Bionian terms, transform them into alpha elements. Ms. C., however, could not trust that her object would receive her smell and allow itself to be penetrated by it. This, as it turned out, helped us to understand her difficulties around sexual intimacy with her husband, which significantly improved by the time we ended a six-year psychoanalytic therapy.

The analysis of Ms. C.’s initial “ignorance” of the existence of my toilet, followed by its use to split off her smelly, unacceptable self, culminating in her greater confidence that she could use me as the toilet-breast, allowed her finally to reown her split-off aggression.

Conclusion

We all carry within us a deep-seated sense that what emanates from our body reveals not only our physical interior, but also our psychic interior, which is why our relationship to toilets is deserving of psychoanalytic interest. The analyst’s toilet comes to represent many things in the context of the analytic relationship, not least because it is a shared physical space where the patient “knows” the analyst’s body is on a level with his: there they are both literally and metaphorically naked. Of course not all analysts provide a toilet as part of the consulting room arrangements, and that in itself raises interesting questions about how a patient might experience the absence of this provision, or how its very provision might be said to gratify the patient—a subject beyond my scope here.

The body odors specifically connected with human excretions reveal the corporeality of analyst and patient and hence their shared vulnerability to feeling exposed and intruded on. The analyst’s toilet is a place where “dirty” secrets may be excitedly deposited and where perverse fantasies can be fueled and acted out, as was the case with Mr. D. It may also be a place, as in the case of Ms. C., where anxieties about aggression and damage to the object can be worked through. The physical space of the toilet provides a safe container where parts of the self felt to be dirty and unacceptable leak out through body waste and its odors before they can become integrated into the analytic relationship.