„You’re Leaving Me? Then I’m Leaving You“: On Holidays, Rage, and Repetition in the Analytic Frame

“There is no such thing as a baby — there is only a baby and someone.”
— D.W. Winnicott (1947)
“You’re on holiday? F* you then. I’m quitting. I’ll go on even more holiday.”**

This is not an unusual response in psychoanalytic work. Often delivered with a mix of defiance, rage, and hurt, such statements arise when patients are faced with a therapist’s absence—particularly for scheduled holidays. On the surface, it may sound petulant or sarcastic. But beneath the sarcasm lies a profound psychic wound: abandonment, repetition, and the unbearable pain of not mattering.

The Holiday as a Rupture
In psychoanalytic treatment, the regularity of sessions creates a psychological holding environment (Winnicott, 1960), a structure that can sustain trust and foster regression in the service of growth. The analytic setting—its rhythm, consistency, and the quiet promise of being there—becomes not just a frame, but a relational skin. When this skin is punctured by a break (however ordinary it may be to the therapist), the experience for the patient may feel like a rupture rather than a pause.

For patients with early relational trauma, the therapist’s holiday may reactivate primitive anxieties of abandonment and annihilation. As Freud noted in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), the loss of an object—even a temporary one—can awaken unconscious grief processes. The patient may feel as though they have ceased to exist in the therapist’s mind, or worse: that they never really mattered.

“I Quit Too”: Revenge, Repetition, and Rebellion
The patient’s counter-response—“then I quit”—can be understood as a manic defense (Klein, 1940) against helplessness. Rather than feel the full weight of dependence or longing, the patient flips the power dynamic: I will leave you before you can leave me. The pain of waiting, of being excluded from the therapist’s life, of being reminded that the therapist is a separate person with needs and pleasures of their own—becomes unbearable. In response, the patient enacts what Freud called repetition compulsion (1920): a familiar script is re-played, in which rejection is met with retaliation, and loss is managed through disavowal.

We might say this: the patient doesn’t want to stop therapy. They want the therapist to feel the pain they are feeling—disregarded, left behind, irrelevant.

The Holiday as a Transitional Trauma
Donald Winnicott’s (1953) concept of transitional phenomena offers another layer of understanding. The therapy relationship often becomes a “transitional space” where the patient negotiates between internal and external realities. When the therapist disappears—suddenly, and in ways the patient cannot control—it can feel like a loss of the transitional object itself. The holding space collapses. The soothing fantasy that the therapist is always emotionally available is shattered.

Bion (1962) would call this a collapse in containment: the patient’s raw emotions (or beta-elements) can no longer be processed, because the container (the therapist) has vanished. In the absence of containment, these feelings are expelled or acted out—often through angry withdrawals, cancellations, or holiday „mirroring.“

The Rage Beneath the Grief
What looks like aggression is often grief in disguise. The anger is a shield against more vulnerable feelings: longing, sadness, envy, dependency. These are hard to admit, especially in a society that idealizes autonomy and disparages need. In some psychodynamic traditions, this moment is seen as a kind of transference crisis: the patient unconsciously relives early relationships in which care was unreliable or inconsistent.

Ferenczi (1932) wrote movingly about the “confusion of tongues” between adult and child—the trauma of not being met in one’s emotional language. The therapist’s holiday can reactivate this early scene of mismatch: the patient speaks the language of loss, while the therapist (in the patient’s mind) is speaking the language of self-care.

Holding the Frame Through Absence
In well-boundaried analytic work, the therapist announces holidays ahead of time, holds the patient’s reaction without defense, and remains emotionally available even in absence—through the space created before and after the break. Analysts often underestimate the emotional impact of their absences, especially on patients for whom reliability is not a given but a gift.

Some patients will use this moment for growth. Others will test the frame again and again. Either way, the break offers a crucible for meaning: a chance to metabolize feelings of abandonment, to explore the deep ambivalence of dependence, and to mourn the therapist’s separateness.

Final Reflections
The patient who says “fuck you then, I quit” is not merely angry. They are mourning a loss that may go back decades. Their protest is not just about the holiday, but about the deeper pain of not having been held, remembered, or prioritized in the past. The therapist’s job is not to apologize for the holiday, nor to take the rage personally—but to hold space for what it represents: a wound re-opened, a dependency exposed, and the terrifying risk of being left behind again.

„The analyst’s reliability becomes not only the setting but the substance of the cure.“
— Thomas Ogden (1992)
References
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Ferenczi, S. (1932). Confusion of Tongues Between the Adults and the Child. In Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis. London: Karnac, 1980.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition, Vol. 14.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, Vol. 18.
Klein, M. (1940). “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.
Ogden, T. H. (1992). The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Winnicott, D. W. (1947). Hate in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 69–74.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89–97.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.