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In this paper I shall be describing a young girl who has been in three-times-weekly treatment for just over a year. So this is really a preliminary report on M., and I propose to concentrate selectively on just a few aspects of her psychic organization—both her disturbance and her surprising degree of normality.
It was this ‘normality’ which particularly struck the diagnostic team, since M. is a child who has lived through a series of quite exceptionally disruptive and difficult events during her twelve years—events which I shall describe shortly. The enlightened Social Services Department which referred her did so not because of any gross disturbance or symptomatology, but in the belief that these experiences were so potentially disruptive that she needed specialist help in coming to terms with them. It was the absence of disturbance in M. which was striking; where one would expect to see frustration and regressive moves in response to gross external impingement, there was nothing of note. The diagnostic meeting found it inexplicable that M. had managed to hold on to her healthy latency development and she was compared to the kind of child described as ‘invulnerable’. Thus, in M's treatment we have an opportunity to look at how she achieved this ‘invulnerability’, and what price she may have paid for it in terms of development. I shall be trying to explore how some of the external difficulties have become represented and organized in M's inner world, shaping the form both of her pathology and of her ability to cope.
Precisely because of the disturbances in her background, we have no developmental history for M. Up to the point where she entered the children's home, our picture of her life is fairly sketchy, although we know the major events. Our picture of her personality is even sketchier.
M. is black; an illegitimate child of West Indian parents. Father dropped out of the picture before she was born, mother soon after. She was fostered with an elderly working-class