You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I met you in January of 1969. I had waited for six months to learn your name and then on the day of our meeting I couldn't find you. In fact, you weren't at home but were in your office as scheduled. I dashed in from the Liggitts' phone booth where I had rather desperately recharted my course; I had always had trouble in finding what I needed—not to mention a penchant for feeling shut out and lost—so we were off to an auspicious start.
I recall you as gentle, young, and soft spoken but a transferential haze quickly clouded my perceptions for when you asked me to tell you more about my work so you'd “know a bit more about what it is you do,” I felt denigrated. Fear and denigration were the most specific feeling memories of that meeting. The next session you warmly but firmly nodded me toward the couch and thus our journey began.
My first dream was of a small hurt boy—hurt in a plane crash I believe—trying and trying to get into the house but unable to. Clearly this dream has many levels—and I had in fact begun to enact it with you the first session—but it does describe my pain and inability to find any sense of safety, caring, security. I felt trapped in my life, and was trapped in my internal conflicts. Childhood amnesia was almost total and it was only intellectually that I knew the impact of my mother's active alcoholism and of my father's sadistic tyranny and seductiveness. Actually one of the very few memories I had was of my father sleeping with his penis touching me—and of the “vow” I took never to tell anyone.
My symbiotic yearnings were insistent and immense. When I saw a loving mother and child anywhere, I literally ached for that nurture. Since age twelve I had spent hours each day fantasizing a good mother