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Sara is 45 and has been in an ongoing analysis with me, four times a week for the last three years. She lives with Bill, who is ten years younger than her. She has two grown-up children from her first marriage. She works as a counsellor and teacher for psycho-socially disturbed teenagers, but due to her psychic and somatic symptoms she has worked only part-time for the last few years.
She sought analysis because of her recurring and serious migraine and fatigue. She had sexual anxiety, and she felt obsessed by the fear of men abusing women. She was almost unable to touch or hug other people except her children and Bill, and was extremely phobic about snakes and worms, especially toy snakes. She was and still is wondering if her father and maternal grandfather abused her sexually. She knows that her father, being an episodic alcoholic, frightened her a lot when she was under 10 years old; he chased her in what he considered to be ‘playing’, imitating a gorilla and touching her in sexualised ways that felt dangerous. He could totally misjudge the relationship even when she was a grown-up woman on her own, and would squeeze her nipples in social situations.
On the other hand, the father was experienced as distant, locking himself into his work room, denigrating ugly women and comparing Sara and her mother to all the beautiful women he saw on TV. He has been a mystery to Sara, a man partly charming towards women, partly isolating himself, working as an executive, but also in very unqualified jobs. The father is an adopted child; he has never seen his biological mother and always felt tension towards his adoptive mother. Sara's mother has been loyal to her husband, maybe out of an awareness of his vulnerabilities. When Sara has tried to talk with her mother about her childhood and what her father was like, the mother has avoided the subject. She doesn't want to talk to her daughter about what it was like in the family; she hints at secrets that she doesn't tell, according