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214 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits
for a moment and had put one hand on the other as protection, feeling himself
touched and protected.
Although he reacted physically to my words, in this session he remained silent.
He seemed determined not to give up. He said to his mother: “Will she never under-
stand that I will never speak?” Has he instigated a type of relationship with his ana-
lyst that will make her suffer because that is the only type of relationship he knows?
Is this a trusted, gratifying form of relationship for him? When he began to attend
sessions more regularly, his mother said he was doing so in order to not disappoint
her and also because she spoke well of me. How had she spoken earlier of me? Neg-
atively? It seemed a lot had been accomplished. Mark’s teachers were happy with
his excellent successes at school, although they thought he could accomplish still
more. His physical appearance had changed: he had grown and looked now like a
15
-year
-old, tall with broad shoulders. The fact that he had grown so fast could have
increased his fear of losing control over his violence and anger. His sexual fears and
their effects seemed to be bound to his paranoid fears of analysis.
The invisible Oedipal conflict
Mark’s pattern of behavior pulled me through his silence into a powerful and
extreme closeness. It seemed to me his wish was to make me so curious and atten-
tive that we would no longer be two separate people. He wanted to control me and
mistreated me because he trusted only such relationships. There was a conflict
between his needy and his proud part, who did wish to know how important I
was for him – something he found humiliating – and his needy part, for whom the
analysis was of vital importance. When he felt he had control, he looked satisfied
with himself. When I understood him, he was afraid that I could penetrate into his
thoughts; then, he rubbed his eyes as if to wipe away my words. He would not tell
me his sexual fantasies – in order to rob me of my success and satisfaction at my
analytic activity, I felt.
Edna O’Shaughnessy’s essay (1989), “The Invisible Oedipus Conflict”, helped
me to understand Mark’s behavior as a manifestation of an early, reversed Oedipal
conflict. Mark could have felt himself excluded from the Oedipal parental pair, as
her patient did. She writes:
(The Kleinian) approach, when the Oedipus complex is what I am calling
“invisible”, is that this is so, not because it is unimportant, but because it is
so important and felt by the patient (from whatever causes) to be so unnegoti-
able that he employs psychic means to make and keep it invisible.
(O’Shaughnessy 1989, 129)
As I saw it, Mark separated the link between his inner world and his analysis, and
he wished to make me accept this separation along with his omnipotent fantasy
that he was the big adult and I was the child waiting helplessly for him. When I
interpreted that he wanted me to feel like a helpless child, he seemed glad and
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence
The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents
- Titel
- Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence
- Untertitel
- The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents
- Autor
- Gertraud Diem-Wille
- Verlag
- Routledge
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-003-14267-6
- Abmessungen
- 16.0 x 24.0 cm
- Seiten
- 292
- Kategorien
- International
- Medizin