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At the time of her self referral Delia S was seventeen and a half years old. She was attending a girls' public school and was about to sit her A-level examinations. She had told her mother that she was feeling generally miserable and wanted someone to talk to, whereupon her mother, having been told of the Centre by a friend, suggested she contact us.
Delia was a ‘fast lane’ case, so no full diagnostic assessment was made. She was initially seen twice by a senior member of the staff whom she impressed as a striking-looking, graceful, trendily-dressed but rather lonely adolescent whose overall misery encompassed feeling stuck. She expressed uncertainty about her future, not knowing what sort of path to carve out for herself that could accommodate her interest in writing and in travelling. Altogether, as the therapist wrote, she was caught up in the difficulties of ‘determining the sort of person she wants to be and, perhaps more importantly, in the struggle to move away from home without feeling too guilty or tied to her disabled mother, or too much anger with the father’.
It was thought that twice-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy would be an appropriate intervention to enable her to leave home and to free her to make some decisions about her future. At the time of referral it was assumed that Delia would remain in psychotherapy for six months, until she went off to college. However during the course of treatment she delayed entry to college, and in the end remained in treatment for more than a year. Delia readily agreed to psychotherapy and her regular attendance over the year reflected her commitment. It also reflected the family culture where, as she wryly remarked at the initial interview, ‘everybody in our family talks and I sort of thought it was my turn’.
In this paper I hope to show how the conflicts underlying her general feeling of misery unfolded. However, I would like to add that it was a relatively brief, psychotherapeutic intervention and not a full anal