My impression of Arthur, a thirty-two year old, is that he works at responding to me agreeably as he thinks I want him to, he frequently goes out of his way to make cutting comments to me about middle-aged men patients, and he responds with anger or teasing to a female patient his age. Arthur has a mother, father, and two older sisters. He obviously let me win at Ping-pong several times. I discussed this with him and asked if {119} he had ever talked with anyone about his responses to older women, people in general, or if he understood them. He said, "No, I have not been able to exactly figure this out yet." I repeated the talking it over. He said, "I haven't had much chance for that." Then staring at me he asked seriously, "Do you think talking it over would help?" I said, "I think that it would take a great deal of effort on your part, but I believe that it could help." 12. I supported appropriate patient self-images with as many concrete "hard to denies" as possible. _Example_ Alice, a middle-aged woman, in the midst of a discussion of the difficulties of living outside the hospital, past relationships with nursing personnel, and her past practical nurse jobs suddenly said, "I worry about being sexually OK." This was kind of blurted out and she observed me closely. I said, "I thought that you had some concerns about this in relation to how you responded to my cutting the hairs on your face. I guess everyone worries at times about their adequacy in this area." She said, "I've never been able to have intercourse; I can just go as far as heavy petting. People say you can get a lot expressed if you have intercourse." I said, "Some people can, but if you have other standards that you've grown up with, (I suspect a rather religious, rigid Jewish background) it might cause difficulties to go against those standards." (Alice first became ill at sixteen, left school, and had some treatment in the community.) "It's pretty responsible not to be willing to bring a fatherless baby into the world, and I'm sure you'd have feelings about how your family might have responded to this sort of thing." Alice nodded and said "It's just that I don't know how womanly I am." I said with gestures and emphatically, "Well, Alice, if you have two things up here and no thing down here, then the fact is that you are a woman." Discussion pursued about her further talking about this topic with her therapist and the value of her working through her feelings in this area. This was a lengthy discussion and the first talking I had experienced Alice doing since her depression. {120} {121} GLOSSARY ~angular view.~ An individual's unique vision of reality necessarily restricted by the angle of his particular here and now. ~authenticity.~ Genuineness; congruence with the self. ~(the) between.~ The realm of the intersubjective. ~bracket.~ Hold in abeyance. ~community.~ Two or more persons struggling together toward a center.