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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, with some detailed clinical material, the difficulties of one of our research patients, B, in moving fully into young adulthood and of separating from an idealized mother.
The patient is a 23-year-old girl who asked for help with panics at thoughts that perhaps she fancied other women and might be a lesbian. These had started to occur during her first heterosexual relationship the previous year.
The panics were quite severe, and were associated at times with nausea, and sometimes vomiting and hyperventilation. They had started to become intense at a time when she was going to be away from home to be abroad with her boyfriend. She found difficulty in eating and was afraid of becoming anorectic, of breaking down and needing hospitalization. Her troubles had a marked effect on her relationship with her boyfriend, who left her a few months later. In other ways she had got on well with him; they seemed to have a lot in common, and the sexual relationship had been enjoyable.
B's other main complaint was that she had periods of depression going back many years, certainly to the age of 10.
Some of these symptoms are present in the clinical material that follows, but first I wish to give some information about B's personal history and family background and then a brief resumé of the first year of the analysis.
B is the elder of two girls of parents who divorced when she was 20. Her sister Elizabeth is two and a half years younger. B lives at home with her mother and sister in comfortable material circumstances.
B seems to regard mother as a calm, competent person without flaws, and as someone impossible to emulate. Mother tends to have a cheerful,