Another patient, a paranoid woman, for many months infuriated not only me but the ward personnel and her fellow patients by arrogantly behaving as though she owned the whole building, as though she were the only person in it whose needs were to be met. This behavior on her part subsided only after I had come to see the uncomfortably close similarity between, on the one hand, her arranging the ventilation of the common living room to her own liking, or turning the television off or on without regard to the wishes of the others, and on the other hand, my own coming stolidly into her room despite her persistent and vociferous objections, bringing my big easy chair with me, usually shutting the windows of her room which she preferred to keep in a very cold state, and plunking myself down in my chair -- in short, behaving as if I owned her room.

Here a variety of meanings and emotions are concentrated, or reduced, in their communicative expression, to some comparatively simple seeming verbal or nonverbal statement.

One finds, for example, that a terse and stereotyped verbal expression, seeming at first to be a mere hollow convention, reveals itself over the months of therapy as the vehicle for expressing the most varied and intense feelings, and the most unconventional of meanings. More than anything, it is the therapist's intuitive sensing of these latent meanings in the stereotype which helps these meanings to become revealed, something like a spread-out deck of cards, on sporadic occasions over the passage of the patient's and his months of work together. one cannot assume, of course, that all these accumulated meanings were inherent in the stereotype at the beginning of the therapy, or at any one time later on when the stereotype was uttered; probably it is correct to think of it as a matter of a well grooved, stereotyped mode of expression -- and no, or but a few, other communicational grooves, as yet -- being there, available for the patient's use, as newly emerging emotions and ideas well up in him over the course of months. But it is true that the therapist can sense, when he hears this stereotype, that there are at this moment many emotional determinants at work in it, a blurred babel of indistinct voices which have yet to become clearly delineated from one another.