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Presenter: The patient is ten years old, the third of four girls, and has one brother. She came for analysis because the family was worried by the fact that she was getting very bad results at school. She was unable to remember the alphabet or to learn numbers; she pressed her pencils too hard and had poor ability in copying the letters of the alphabet. She underwent a test which confirmed that her spatial and temporal co-ordination was poor; it also revealed that she is very intelligent.
Her mother has twice had psychotic crises and was in hospital on both occasions. She is in a psychotic state almost all the time and pays little attention to what the children are doing. She has always complained about this child, saying that the other children are intelligent but that this one is dull and stupid.
Bion: Did you think that the account of her test fitted in with what you see of her?
P: Yes. She seems to have no conventional sense of time. It is difficult to follow her because in her play everything seems to happen at once.
B: So she tells you a very great deal in a short space of time?
P: Yes, especially by her actions – carrying her dolls from one place to another, going out of the room, coming back, and so on. She often shows also that she doesn't understand the limitations of space. She tries to go into the other rooms; she can't stand the limitations of the play-room. The main thing I noticed at the beginning of the analysis, and now in this last month, is that she loves to pretend that we are at school and she is the teacher. In this last year she has progressed slowly and she can now read and write a little. She likes to test me to see if I can write or if I know how to add. In the last
session she was trying to find out if I knew how to multiply. She used to be very severe, always threatening me, “You must do this”, and “You must do that”.
B: I think that what you are describing is an experiment to find out what happens if she isn't so strict; she can try being yo