Commentary by a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and Forensic Psychotherapy Society

In discussion of the clinical material related to B, I was struck by the sense of unresolved mourning and impoverished contact evident both in the patient's presentation and in the relationship with the therapist themselves. It was as if there were a magnetic field around the patient preventing contact, leaving B in a state of constant hunger and dissatisfaction. While there were hints at deep and pressing states of mind that drove him at times to suicidal despair, it did not appear that these were fully presented in the consulting room, contained and digested, despite what seemed to be a safe and distant connection between the two.

We are not given much information about the patient's early life other than his rather tyrannical father, who treats him as stupid despite his clear intellectual gifts and a mother who does not protect him or acknowledge the harm his father's treatment inflicts on him, other than to offer him the means to get away, by selling her jewellery. He is ambivalent about leaving home, and is caught in an oedipal trap where he retains a sense of castration by his father, never able to become a grown man, and longing for a woman, but unable to commit to one. We learn that his mother died when he was 25, of cancer, but nothing of his feelings about this, though he engages in therapy some 20 years later. He does seem to be in a state of unresolved mourning, where, as Freud so aptly described, ‘the shadow of the ego falls on the object’ (Freud, 1917) and in the beginning of therapy he spends much time feeling suicidal and many days on his sofa, lying down. This seems an unconscious identification with a depressed or dying mother, and his internalized rage at her passing, and his father's ongoing presence, a vital and brutal force within his psyche, with obvious links to what we learn is the deadening force of ‘The Hammer’, though this is left implicit in the account. We learn that he wanted to marry ‘an American girl’ and briefly left to live abroad w