You can Run But you can't Hide: The Analysis of a Latency-Age Boy

Dominic was a ten-year-old boy whose constitution and object relationship history predisposed him to the experience of burdensome anxiety. His habitual mode of defence, which also characterized his way of being, was near-manic activity in the service of denial. Through two years of treatment, Dominic was ever-active, singing, dancing, building and gambolling through session after session. While we expect from latency children a paucity of verbal reference to their inner worlds, with Dominic this was compounded by the marked and perpetual ‘on-the-run’ quality which informed all his communications. What was he running from? In this paper I will try to tackle that question and to describe the way in which analytic treatment helped Dominic to slow down, face what he sought to hide from, and move ahead.

At the age of seven Dominic began receiving psychoanalytic help for his emotional difficulties, described by the parents as ‘night-time fears’. It was quickly evident that Dominic's conflicts were primarily coloured by a profound feeling of damage and inadequacy in relation both to himself and to his objects. After a year in treatment, it emerged that Dominic suffered from a serious learning difficulty which to some extent may be regarded as an ego deficit. This constitutional factor compounded his emotional difficulties. Yet, even if he had not been afflicted by an impediment to achieving literacy, his development would still have been hampered by his overwhelming and restrictive anxiety, deriving from his intense fears of annihilation, loss of the object, loss of the object's love, and castration. Eventual analytic progress depended on interpretation of Dominic's fears of the damage his omnipotent fantasies would bring, his entrenched idealization of his parents, and his negative sense of self.

The referral was prompted by Dominic's parents’ exasperation with what they described as Dominic's shift from being a ‘bouncy, cheery and biddable boy’ to being a fearf