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Alix is a 30 year-old woman, with a severe and cold appearance. When she first came to see me nine years ago, her femininity and beauty were eclipsed. She still had a child-like appearance that contrasted with her precise and sophisticated use of vocabulary. In introducing Alix and the course of analysis, I will summarize both my impressions from the early years and some history. I will then present what seemed a very meaningful dream that occurred after a long break following the birth of her third child. At this time she had decided to stop the analysis but reluctantly continued.
In the first interview, overcome by tears, she told me that she no longer knew what to do with her life. She was making no further progress with writing her thesis and, worse still, having been in a relationship for the last two years, and willing settle down with her partner, she no longer knew whether “she wanted to have a child with him or to leave him”. She was overwhelmed by confusion and vacillating between paradoxical solutions and total inhibition.
The rigid defensive organization that she had constructed was cracking at the very time that she was strengthening a love relationship and, “now wanting to have a child with a partner” (faire un enfant á deux), she was suddenly confronted with her deficient primary identifications and the tumult of her drives. My clinical impression was that her fear of an existential question about her origins emerging was making her vacillate. Her usual defences were failing and the intellectual cathexis was no longer operative. The phallic control of her emotions was no longer compensating for her narcissistic deficiencies. It was this sudden sense of being overwhelmed that I sensed had brought her to the consulting room.
Having been conceived, in a fleeting encounter, by her mother and a famous man her mother admired, Alix was then brought up alone by her mother. They were both proud of “the atypical family they formed without a father who gives beatin