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This is a very moving and vividly written session with a 16-year-old girl just before a Christmas break and just before sessions are going to be reduced from three times a week to once weekly, moving towards finishing the therapy in the summer.
Knowing that an ending is in sight sets the context for us to expect to see a regressed patient. We also know from the background information about the family that separation might be experienced as particularly dangerous for this girl and for her parents. We are told that complications in Greta’s birth meant that her mother was unable to have more children and also that her mother became ill with cancer when Greta was five years old, around the time when she would have started primary school. We hear that once her mother went into remission, her father left her for another woman and that it was at this point that Greta started experiencing psychosomatic symptoms. We are told that Greta was sent away to boarding school aged 11, another key point of separation, and, with the onset of adolescence, became deeply depressed and suicidal.
The picture presented is of an emotionally deprived girl with separated parents who from the beginning of her life have found it difficult to come together as a parental couple to think about the needs of their only child. Unsurprisingly, Greta struggles with relationships both with her own mind and with others. We do not have any information about intergenerational patterns of trauma but we might hypothesise that the trauma of Greta’s birth was not fully attended to and that instead her parents retreated into their jobs, the other babies in their lives, leaving Greta before she was ready to be left. The therapist describes Greta at the beginning of therapy as wanting to be in ‘the bubble’ with her mother and comments on her rage at the slightest move to separate. The picture is of a retreat into a primitive state of being. We might hypothesise that as a baby Greta did not experience a facilitating