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This is the story of Ben, a young adolescent boy tormented by obsessive thoughts. As the treatment unfolds, it will be seen how his compulsive thinking defended against sexual and aggressive impulses. His conflicts over sexual identity reflected his inability to separate from the primary preoedipal objects.
Ben's treatment shows his swing from the idealized attachment to an older male companion to the conflictual but dependent relationship to the father.
The second phase of the oedipal constellation does not move automatically into the centre of the adolescent process. The more reckless the revolt the more profoundly repressed is the son's dyadic father attachment. The adolescent boy's aggressive affects towards the father are a defence against an incompletely relinquished dyadic attachment and the regressive drift of these affects coincides with the boy's physical sexual maturation. This is the source of the transient homosexual preoccupation which is never absent from adolescent sexual self-awareness. (Bios, 1988)
Bios postulates that the dyadic attachment has to be relinquished before there can be a move forward to a second oedipal position.
Although the therapeutic intervention was limited Ben did manage to loosen the dyadic attachment to the father. This made it possible for him to face and begin to deal with oedipal issues.
Ben was referred to the Centre when he was 14. His marked and distressing obsessional symptoms began when he was 9. Fearing that he might swallow harmful objects in his bedroom he had such items as batteries, belts and money removed from his room each night.
Later in treatment he referred to this time as ‘the time I was afraid of killing myself’.
His symptoms were somewhat alleviated during once-a-week