La Vita Nuova

When I retrieve Beatrice from the waiting-room, her mother is there too. As her mother routinely attempts to engage me in conversation, Beatrice stands with her head hung, fidgeting. When I ask her in the session how she feels while her mother and I speak, she answers, after a thoughtful pause: “In the middle.” Beatrice is 19 years old but comes across as prepubescent. She is slender with big brown eyes and wears pre-teen clothes: tight jeans, an undersized hoodie and tennis shoes. In our interactions she is tense and suspicious, but strikes me, too, as fierce and bright.

Beatrice was referred to me by a senior colleague who had already recommended an analysis. Her father, a businessman who had recently been transferred to a nearby city, called me to discuss the possibility of treatment. He then asked that I call his wife to set up the initial appointment. In retrospect, it may have been important to have Beatrice call me herself. In this early interplay, I had placed Beatrice “in the middle” between her parents and unwittingly reproduced the dynamic we would struggle with in these first six months of treatment.

Although I structured the first sessions as an evaluation, both Beatrice and her parents were prepared to begin the analysis, and so, as Beatrice perched rigidly and nervously on the edge of the chair, she articulated the desire to begin as soon as possible. Because of this, the evaluation felt foreshortened, and I learned less than I might have from the initial interviews.

Beatrice did not have very much information about her childhood. She did, however, remark that she was a “bratty kid,” but that she gave it up (at about age 13) because “it was too tiring to be angry all the time.” Except for kindergarten, Beatrice has been homeschooled by her mother her entire life. Beatrice did not know the reasons for her homeschooling, nor did she think it a question to ask. She has a sister, two years older, also homeschooled, who has successfully gone to college, has a