Page - 239 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 239 A: What words did you use? Patient: (sobbing violently) Stay – here! Don’t – leave! A: When you say the exact words, you are completely connected to your feelings. You wanted to say it to your mother and didn’t have the confidence and now you’re saying it to me, to your analytic mother, and hope that I understand it. When you leave your hairband here, you are here in your fantasy and I won’t leave. Patient: I said it but my mother just left. It was like when my oldest son went to kindergarten. The teacher said to the mothers, they should go . . . But I kept standing there and waited until he stopped crying . . . now my neck is free again. A: And here too I send you away and I don’t want to hear you anymore when you are in the middle of telling me such important things. Patient: (stands up, says goodbye and leaves. By the door, she turns around, looks at the couch, takes her hairband, looks at me and smiles.) Discussion This session moved me deeply. We both experienced how thin indeed defenses can be. When she did not feel “contained”, she projected her needs onto her chil- dren. She did not wish to be a bad mother, but she had had a mother who left her with the grandmother in good conscience, not knowing what she was doing to her baby. In this moment, the patient felt herself understood in her own estimation as an inadequate mother for Vinzenz. I recognized how she acknowledged her suffering under not being with her longed -for mother but with her grandmother. When she felt understood, she could internalize this experience. She felt relieved and could take her hairband with her. Her smile when she turned around showed that she could well recognize her wish to remain with me. The patient began this session with themes related to her second or youngest son. Vinzenz could live alone in the supervised apartment, absolving his training and apprenticeship in protected workshops or in accompaniment in actual work- places. In her dreams, violent scenes occurred: a playground slide that had a knife built into it, cutting the children’s bottoms when they slid down. Her associations led to her infant experience of neediness and greed. She had experienced separa- tion from her mother, along with an early and abrupt weaning, as crippling. In her fantasy, she had severed her mother’s breasts. The separations from me at the end of the week were also very painful, like a wound. She projected her neediness onto Vinzenz and was worried about him. At the same time, she and he were so furious that both had thoughts of suicide. She remembered that she once came into his room and saw an open window. He had hid himself to scare her, and she was indeed convinced that he had jumped out the window; already once before, he had stepped out onto the windowsill and threatened to jump. She did not dare to look out the window in dread of viewing his mutilated body.