Page - 215 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 215 gave a cruel smile. When he rushed into the therapy room – and, by implication, into the analytic -maternal body – and remained there for an hour, he could sustain his fantasy that there was no change and no separation. We can only interpret the particular way Oedipal conflict is expressed when an analyst feels under pressure from the patient to behave a certain way; patients’ primitive inner objects come from the time before they could speak. I would like to demonstrate how I interpreted his wish to be inside me: After two sessions he attended punctually – a rare occurrence – he came into the room as usual, without looking at me. He looked around and sat down, putting his jacket over his arm and thus hiding his arm under it. A: When you are here, you don’t think it necessary to speak, as if you feel safe in your jacket, in the room. M: (moves one hand in his pants pocket) A: You are showing me that you protect the space between the sessions. M: (looks at me, pauses, whereupon I hear something rustling) A: (seeing a piece of paper in his pocket) You would like to take something out of your pocket, but as soon as you try to, something holds you back, as if there would be a risk that the world collapses. You feel stuck in me. M: (looks alarmed, then looks at the couch) A: You are afraid of not being able to move when you get stuck. Maybe you would like to lie on the couch, but you’re afraid not to be able to leave then. M: (looks quickly out the window and then slowly takes a piece of paper out of this pocket, inch by inch so that it didn’t rustle; at the end of the session he gave it to me) Before, when he rang my bell, he assumed he could come directly into the therapy room and was irritated when I made him say his name over the intercom – as if I had made a barrier between him and me. What significance did the paper have? Something was hindering him from taking it out. His silence had the quality of a child’s, who did not wish to speak because that would have demonstrated that it was separated from its parents. When he felt himself in me via the chair, the jacket and the room, he did not connect to me as a whole object (a person with good and bad qualities), but rather as a fetus in my belly. His mother told me that he was never in competition with his siblings, his father or the other students. Since Mark’s mother could not recollect anything unusual during his weaning – which represents an important inner pattern and model for separation – I was reduced to speculation. What was the link between his repressed aggression and the meaning of his difficulties at separation. His escape was to withdraw to his fantasy of being inside me. When he became aware of this desire, he became fearful, and I became for him a version of the unified Oedipal couple that had turned against him. Klein writes: “Sometimes the analyst appears simultaneously to represent both parents – in that case often in a hostile alliance against the patient, whereby the negative transference acquires great intensity” (Klein 1952, 54).