Clinical Commentary 41

We are delighted to present the sixth Clinical Commentary of this series and are very grateful to the psychotherapist who has offered clinical material and to the three commentators.

Mark Budden

[markbudden@talktalk.net]

Ann Horne

[annhorne44@gmail.com]

I have been seeing Suli for four months, initially once weekly. He is 21 and the referral was straightforward. His mother pays for his therapy but I have had no direct contact with her. Suli told me that he was failing to produce the work expected of him on his college course and that he was feeling ‘very down’.

The young man I met was friendly, open and sensitive, but there was something else that made me wonder if he would resist whatever I said. In the second session he moved onto the couch, and I remember this seeming sudden, as if he was impelled or propelled to lie down. I wonder if lying down simultaneously represents a wish to ‘stay in bed and not get up’ (frequently reported) thus avoiding direct contact, and a hope that, freed from the need to adapt to, accommodate and simultaneously resist the other, he might discover a part of himself which can speak his own words, and find his own mind and his own desire.

Whilst I have his permission to write about him and am disguising key details, I will only give a light sketch of Suli's family and his history. He was born to professional parents, has an older brother and sister, and then his father dies suddenly when Suli is 3 years old. He is not sure what he remembers and what he has been told; perhaps the lights of an ambulance or police car through the windows, on off on off. Perhaps the body being carried out of the house?

Since then his mother has held her career, her family and her home together. Suli describes the family as close, remembering the three children in bed with their mother, comfortably watching television together.

Suli seemed very stuck, not getting any of his college work done, while buying off his tutors (and trying to buy off himself