Clinical Material

(The clinical material has been carefully disguised to preserve the patient's anonymity)

R sought help several years ago; he was shocked by his experience of a breakup. It was a significant relationship that he had imagined contained a future for him. He felt defeated by the ending of this relationship which had been with a young woman who seemed his ideal match. Soon after the loss of this relationship, he left his job, literally slamming the door behind him, and found himself without a steady income. R, now considering himself a ‘two-time loser’, turned to psychotherapy

with what I discovered turned out to be a disguised demand - he wanted these losses recovered to him.

Superficially, R seemed nothing out of the ordinary: A man in his thirties, working in a technical field, he was surrounded by friends he had made at university and had several hobbies. At the same time, R implicitly revealed some kind of deficit in maintaining relationships, wondering why time and again wherever there was a hint of a close relationship they would fail. He sought to appear outwardly ‘normal’ in the hope that this would enable him to be ‘happy’ with his life, to have more self-awareness and feel better about himself. But every time I was left baffled by his often ridiculous, almost childish way of portraying the people he encountered. He seemed unable to contemplate what his relationships with different people might have evoked in him, instead trying to choose ‘the correct formula’ for ‘effective interaction’, as he described it. I felt lost in the face of his entire approach to his difficulties and how he expected to solve them in a mechanistic, artificial way.

As his life had not worked out as R had wished, he felt a sense of vexation and a conviction that he would fail, even though he was consciously invested in seeking success. R attributed these failures to his ‘insufficient development’, but he could not explain this and compulsively attended a variety of psychological trainin