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After reading this record of a session of clinical work, I was left with a number of thoughts and feelings. I was concerned about several aspects of Rebecca’s life and what seemed to me to be her fragile personality development. Rebecca appeared to be ‘emotionally homeless’ as if she has no base or sense of a reliable object and is not equipped, internally, for the uncertainties of life as she prepares to move into young adulthood.
I am concerned about Rebecca’s capacity to manage to live in a safe and ordinary way as she moves on with her life, away from home and her therapy. This leaves me with feelings of anxiety and sadness as I try to pull together my emotional and thinking responses to the clinical material.
I wonder about endings in therapy and how difficult these are for the child or young person we are seeing. I remember a seminar leader helpfully encouraging me to think aloud with the young person about what they might take with them from the experience of being in therapy with their therapist. Has Rebecca got an object that can take in and make sense of her experiences of her therapy? I am curious about the public external identity of Rebecca and the more private, internal identity and wonder about Rebecca’s struggle to bring these different aspects of herself together in a more integrated way.
The transition from childhood to adulthood is a complicated physical and emotional process and Rebecca does not appear to be as well prepared, equipped or supported, as many young people might need to be in order to manage these transitions.
One of the first things we are told about Rebecca is that she is ‘very good-looking – a classic English rose, very well spoken and well presented with a bohemian edge, a musical talent and aspirations to be an actress’. There is a sense that this is an idealised view of her and that, as a result of these external qualities, she might be envied and idealised by others but that, privately, she might need to ‘live in the skin of oth