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In writing this I find I have been unsure if I should confine my comments to those which would more naturally be used if I were supervising this work, or if I should try to comment from a stance of imagining myself as the therapist. These two overlap, but supervision quite clearly takes place with the existing framework of the therapist and patient and what is contained in that. When supervising, I hear of many things done and said which I might well not do or say myself, but I have to look and see if it is appropriate to the situation being presented. What I might have done in the same situation may or may not be relevant. My personality and psyche is not the therapist's personality and psyche or vice versa.
Writing about this case proved more difficult from the alternative interpretative viewpoint, which has felt like an intrusion into the work. It is possible that my counter transference is picking up either the feelings of an enmeshed family when the rigid boundary between themselves and the outside world is threatened, or the feelings of an outsider trying to negotiate that boundary. Maybe at some level that might reflect the feelings of the therapist in this case.
I am interested in the stated reasons for seeking therapy: (1) ‘To cope (my emphasis) with his feelings about his father's death’. Coping has for me an air of maintaining the status quo and somewhere this speaks into one of my feelings about this case - that it could be stuck (though I do not deny it is also moving) around father. Where is mother? (2) ‘To explore his roots … etc.’ Identity is the word which springs to mind. There is an identity crisis - and no wonder! This man hardly exists as an individual. (3) ‘To have the experience of therapy’, i.e., to have an experience he has never had. Is this where mother comes in? I'm sure that is not what the patient consciously intended. I note that he is in his forties, and think of mid-life crisis and Jung's ‘second half of life’. Coming from an enmeshed