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Many details in this full and vivid account deserve attention, and a commentary will necessarily be selective. My choice is to approach the task with a focus on two different points in the material which particularly draw my attention: one is the patient's highly revealing ‘Christmas turkey’ dream, and the other is the technique adopted by the therapist, especially as evident in the difficult session described at the end.
First the dream. In the initial part of it the patient, B, is trying to get rid of two old carpets, both of them reminding her of ‘trampled and well-worn’ carpets which actually existed in her childhood home. In the second half of the dream, B finds a cooked turkey which has been left over from Christmas. This turns out to be still fresh under its foil wrapping and its skin. In the session B is able to provide associations to the dream and some valuable analytic work follows.
I would go along with the therapist's conviction that the old carpets represent B's parents. The patient has every reason to think of both of them as having led downtrodden, ‘trampled’ lives and as having been worn down by their difficulties. More specifically, her mother was continually down-trodden by her father, while he himself was worn down by his repeated, and ultimately fatal psychiatric illness. Unlike the therapist, though, I feel that the carpets are not simply ‘the parents’ but, more specifically, their worn-out, depressed and now destroyed aspect. B's desire in the dream to rid herself of the two carpets is thus not a straightforward rejection of her parents. Rather, it suggests her struggle to be rid of an underlay of depression left in her by her exposure, since childhood, to her parents' unhappiness. B knows that both her parents not only died prematurely, but died after leading considerably unhappy lives.