In this paper Patrick Casement will explore some of the origins of love and the search for love. He will give a clinical example to illustrate the search for the lost good object and also offer an example of that different kind of caring, which can bear being hated. He will also give examples of patients who have brought their sexual problems into the therapy and explore how to manage this therapeutically.

Patrick's own clinical thinking has often been greatly helped by the process he has come to call "internal supervision". To illustrate this he will present a detailed account of a single session from his own work. In this he will be including much of his own (silent) thinking in the session alongside the record of what was said by the patient and his responses.

In this paper Patrick will describe an analysis in which the patient came to feel that what had been most important to him in the analytic process had grown out of Patrick becoming able to be deeply in touch with the patient's childhood experience of isolation, which he felt no-one had recognised. He also needed Patrick to understand what he was consciously trying to communicate, which no-one before had seemed able to grasp. Much of what this patient most valued therefore lay beyond the normal practice of interpreting what may lie in the unconscious mind. In other words, here, Patrick needed to go beyond interpretation. It was more a matter of being in touch.