Discussion

Dr. Lupi is to be congratulated on a very lucid, well-organized report of an analysis that was clearly difficult, yet in certain respects rewarding. My discussion of the case will not involve any efforts to reanalyze the patient or to resupervise the analyst. I believe strongly that if you weren't there you cannot fully appreciate the experience. Rather, I want to try to respond to some of Dr. Lupi's questions and to consider some of the developmental issues suggested by this case.

Dr. Lupi's major questions revolve around the issue of termination. Was the timing right? Was everything done that should have been done? To what extent did countertransference elements enter into the decision?

This patient, though chronologically an adult, was developmentally an adolescent, struggling with typical adolescent issues of autonomy versus dependence, identity organization, and sexual maturation. Above all, he exemplified in graphic detail, through innumerable transference manifestations, Peter Blos's (1979) thesis about the crucial importance of the negative Oedipus complex in male adolescent development and its central role in the analysis of such patients. In endless ways this patient demonstrated his conflict between the wish to submit to the analyst and his fear of doing so; his longings for a powerful, dominating, even punitive father figure and his desperate need to rebel against such imagined domination; his wish to please the analyst and his defensive need to defy him; his unconscious identification with, longing for, and admiration of his psychopathic father, and his defensive need to repudiate and distance himself from him.

At the same time, palpable, positive oedipal themes were evident, accentuated by the actualities of his family life, in particular, by the intensity of his relationship with his mother and the parents' longstanding conflict and ultimate separation. This left him, ultimately,