My hypothesis was that Sally felt guilty about the affair and was ‘using’ the roommate as her punishment. Of course, all of this was part of Sally’s unconscious oedipal agenda and as such it would never stand up in a court of law, so to speak. So I decided that I needed more evidence of this hypothesis before presenting it to her. The best case scenario would be if Sally put the pieces together and came up with it herself.
When Sally couldn’t understand why her judgment was so far off in having selected this roommate, I used that as an entrée into her thinking at that time. I questioned whether there were any red flags that she may have overlooked. At first she said: “Definitely not”. But the more she spoke the more Sally revealed that there were some warnings that she chose to ignore. For example, the woman’s repeated excuses why she couldn’t provide references and there were large gaps in her work history that were never accounted for. Then Sally remembered a disturbing dream that she had at that time. She didn’t understand it but she never forgot it and , in retrospect, seemed to provide the missing link between the two stories.
