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patient know exactly what happened early on, but what counts are the
meanings the patient's unconscious ascribes to them.
The first of the three presentations with the severely traumatized was
by Jody Messler Davies of the NYU Postdoctoral Program. She described
her work with Sam, a patient who was "in deep despair," having been badly
hurt by a sexually abusing father. She told of her empathic responses to the
slowly emerging tale of the little boy who loved this father intensely and
then had to split off from his rageful reaction to abuse by lying. She made
his buried, early conflicts come alive and led Sam (and us) to understand
why the little boy had to dissociate from his feelings, and later on was
unable to distinguish between meaningful and simply parotted words.
Sam, for a long time, had to passively submi t to Davies in order to avoid
feeling, and only much later, in the tug of the transference-countertrans–
ference relationship, was able to move between the two little boys, the
abused one and the one who "manages" him. Davies ended up by refer–
ring to Fairbairn's work with abused patients who keep living in a world
of conditioned reflexivity, fluctuating between hope and potential annihi–
lation. Like Will Hunting's therapist, though maybe a little less
dramatically, Davies repeatedly told Sam: "It's not your fault."
Peter Fonagy of the British Psychoanalytic Society presented
Henrietta, who was a murderer, and eventually confessed to him that she
had killed her boyfriend intentionally rather than accidentally as she had
claimed in court.Mter having been abused by her alcoholic father between
the ages of seven and eleven, she had had sexual relations with a priest at
her school. But unlike the dissociated Sam, Henrietta was as nasty and
provocative with her analyst as Will Hunting of the movie. She constant–
ly attacked him, was "apparently angry yet basically terrified," and afraid
that either he would kill her or that she would kill him.
In
their sessions,
she zig-zagged between anger and the need to control, between being there
and totally absent. In the transference she wanted Fonagy to understand
her, yet did everything to throw him off guard. Her inner world emerged
in dreams that provided only blurry windows on other dreams. Henrietta
apparently had internalized her abusers' cruelty through a tortuous process
that led her to identifY with the aggressor. To experience coherence of her
self she had to find someone to torture her- a process she tried to repli–
cate in the analysis. Only during the fourth year did hatred for her father
begin to emerge, together with a dislike of her analyst. Eventually, this ini–
tiated a more viable interaction. Fonagy generalized that patients with
personality disorders and histories of seduction always are provocative and
that their analysts' reactions might make them even more difficult; that by
elici ting their negative responses they get them to lose their therapeutic
identity. And he concluded that-contrary to some theorists-one can
