Page - 237 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 237 The patient succeeded in acting out her conviction of being unloved, sent away and having no place in the world in analysis, i.e., she actually experienced it. After the escalation with Vinzenz, she agreed to a four -times -a -week analysis. Already in the first week she arrived at her Wednesday 11:00 session at 9:50 and asked if she could use the bathroom. When I informed her that I expected her at 11:00, she left and returned an hour later. She was furious at being sent away. She linked this experience to her childhood where her older and younger sisters were given preferential treatment – there was never space for her. I was able to keep to a tem- poral structure, which although it made her furious, also relieved her. Spitefully, she added that she was proud of her chaos; order was bourgeois and ridiculous. In the following weeks, she forgot her hairband, in order to leave something by me. She could show her great unconscious wishes for security and closeness only through small mistakes or Freudian slips. She was, however, able to accept my interpretation and felt herself understood. She could not exhibit joy regarding her husband and children and could not express praise for them. But after she felt very strong joy that I expected her four times a week, it occurred to her how seldom she showed joy to her husband. The day after this session, she managed to say, while shopping for a new kitchen with her husband, that she liked it and was glad. She kept forgetting her hairband before the weekend and was ashamed of thus expressing her urgent wish to stay with me. She had the feeling of being bound to Vinzenz “with a chain”. At the beginning of the new year, Vinzenz moved to a supervised apartment where he was visited once a week by a social worker. During the day, he attended vocational training. The mother had found it difficult to let Vinzenz move away. She was able to recognize my interpretation of her worry: that she wished Vinzenz could not manage without her. She wept when I understood how happy she was to finally find her place with me. She wavered between her conviction that Vinzenz would return within two days and the understanding that she didn’t actually want to give him up and let him become independent. Vinzenz was now regularly attending behavioral therapy – without her management. After three months, when spring had come, she could recognize that she had always been dissatisfied. She talked of her suicidal impulses, of driving a car and wanting to run it into a tree so that everything would be over. Once, she wanted to jump out of a window in her house, but she was unhappy with the idea of “slinking away”. In one Wednesday session, the relation between her experiences with Vinzenz and her own wishes as a baby became clear. After Vinzenz began to do well in his supervised apartment, her youngest son Justin began to develop problems at school. Wednesday session At first, she made sure she put her hairband where she would not forget it (it was the last session before a ten -day vacation). Patient: I asked my friend why she thinks her children developed well. She is also psychologically educated and said, “They are securely attached.” That made