Clinical material

Background

Greta is 16. After a traumatic birth she spent the first few years of her life moving from one country to another with her parents, because of their jobs. Greta is an only child and because of complications around her birth her mother could not have other children. When she was five years old her mother became ill with cancer and the family moved to the UK. As mother went into remission father left her for another woman, and this had a very significant impact on Greta, who started to suffer with psychosomatic symptoms and was very anxious. Greta is a bright and talented student but since a young age she has been bullied and has found it difficult to manage her emotions. When she was 11 years old she went to a high achieving girls’ boarding school. She found it very difficult to be away from her parents, struggled to fit in with her peers and was bullied. Greta was referred to CAMHS when she was 14 because of severe depression and panic attacks. She self-harmed and had persistent thoughts about taking her own life by jumping from the window of her room at school. When I started to work with her, Greta had stopped attending school and was spending half of the week with her mother and the other half with her father, depending on their work commitments. All Greta seemed to want was to be with her mother in what she called ‘the bubble’, in an almost infantile state of symbiosis. Every sign of her mother’s separateness seemed to stir up in her intense feelings of rage, which she often directed against herself. She was in competition with her mother’s job and seemed to fall into a state of fragmentation when she experienced her mother as emotionally unavailable, while also clinging onto an idealised view of her mother. She was more ambivalent about her father, whom she wanted to please but whom she also blamed for all the difficult events of her childhood.

I offered Greta intensive psychotherapy and the session that follows took place one year and