Commentary by a Child and Adult Analyst (SAP)

My understanding of this session derives from the impact of the weekend break, in the context of the broken intimacy between mother and baby. I experienced F as a baby whose relationship to the breast had been interrupted, a baby of extraordinary resilience and determination fighting for exclusive possession of his therapist mother. The first part of the session is concerned with the way he slips into tyrannical behaviour and gives into this part of himself, severely taxing his therapist in the enactment of his tyranny. The change occurs in her containment of his tantrum and the way she was able skilfully to help F be safely in touch for a short while with his depressive feelings.

The session begins with F smiling, pleased to see his therapist but struggling against the abusive little tyrant in him who fills the inside of the therapist mummy with shit over the three-day break. He is a little boy with a short sleeve penis, wondering if mummy therapist will like him and want to touch him as much as he imagines she has enjoyed touching her long-sleeved daddy-husband over the weekend. (This refers to his weekend masturbatory attacks on the parents' intercourse.) Just seeing the therapist seems to have disorientated him (going in the wrong direction to the room) as if through his eyes he is going into a state of projective identification with the inside of her body which he later tells us is a big mess. He turns out the cupboard in a sadistic and physically violent manner. What has changed inside mummy over the weekend? Is there any evidence of mummy therapist's inside having been visited by a big Daddy, the mother fucker inside the mummy which he refers to at the beginning of the session? He concludes his attack on the inside of his therapist-mummy's body with the statement that it is a ‘big mess today’.

While this statement is triumphant in tone (referring to the job he has done to reassert an imaginary control over the inside of mummy) there is buried in this a poignanc