Seite - 207 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 207 glad he was? When I later suggested that he might have many thoughts regarding whether he might bring his outside experiences to me in therapy, he seemed to soften and observe the room with interest. Mark found it difficult to adjust to a four -hour analysis. At first he thought he could only come twice a week. Later, when he accepted that his serious problems required more frequent analysis, he shook his head when I suggested Monday and Tuesday, saying “We have afternoon classes at school”. I then offered him Satur- day in addition to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, which he accepted. He must have known that I was making an exception for him: this session would have a special meaning. He seldom missed it, although it was unclear to me whether he came on his own or his mother brought him on Saturdays. Only with difficulty did he find his place in analysis – just as he had had a diffi- cult start as a baby: he had cried often, was hard to pacify and had difficulty going to sleep. His mother said they had wanted to have Mark, the pregnancy and birth were “normal”, but he was a “terrible baby”. During his first three years, he would wake up several times at night. Only when his mother told him (at three years old) that she was sleeping in the next room was he capable of calming himself and sleeping through the night. I presumed that his parents had not perceived his fears, and his mother could not contain his projections or understand his needs. Bion describes this type of mother when he discusses a patient who had experienced a mother who dutifully responded to the infant’s emotional display. The dutiful response had in it an element of impatience. . . . From the infant’s point of view she should have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that the child was dying. It was this fear, that the child could not contain. (Bion 1959, 104) Bion’s patient had a mother who could not perceive his intense feelings and denied them. In the case of Mark’s mother, it turned out that at the time of his birth, she had had a serious crisis to master – as she related to me in subsequent parent conferences. Her father had left the family, saying that he had waited 18 years until she had grown up. After this, she refused to speak with him, so that he only saw Mark when Mark was ten years old. Mark’s mother seems to have been over -challenged not only by her rage and grief, but also by her own moth- er’s stress. She was also taking care of her handicapped brother, so that she had almost no inner psychic space to deal with little Mark. Mark’s attempt as a baby to establish contact to his mother must have been increasingly massive and over- whelming – to the point of tortured screaming – which would have elicited even more fear from the mother. All of the mother’s accounts of her difficult situation at Mark’s birth came out during one parent conference where she had come to end Mark’s analysis, although he had exhibited astonishing changes at school. I assumed that the mother envied her son for receiving so much attention when