Discussion

Audience Member: It seems at first you were speaking from your own reality when you said you couldn't stand this anymore; you were asking him to take your reality into account. Then, in a different approach to his omnipotence, you took up the position that he was refusing to deal with reality for good reason—his reality was so awful. It seems the aliens gave him a better compromise, and helped him play with reality.

Anne Alvarez: It is awful when you see a child getting more ill. You watch the child falling deeper into sadomasochistic relationships, and you see deficits in healthy development. I wonder about his early talking about problems: Was it even a bit too precocious? I think about all the details he elaborated about digestion and his b.m.'s; he is hooked on a theory of himself, even when he says his body wants this and he wants that. Is it really him? Does he know what it really feels like to let go? He appeared to get more ill, but maybe the apparent development had been too precocious, and he was quite ill at the beginning. In this case I think it is both; he might have been too precociously insightful at the beginning, but subsequently he clearly did harden up. I have seen this in patients of my own, and in ones I've been involved with, and it is awful to witness.

I also wanted to come back to the very difficult and interesting technical issue of how you deal with these abusive objects in the room—and the question of whether it helps to name the outside parents. I have a little boy who could not play at all at the beginning. Now he'll play in a transitional area, and the play will involve a cruel, horrible mother doing things—horribly torturing things—to a little child. I could not say to him, “This is what you feel about your mother.” I wouldn't dare, because he wouldn't let me. But even if I say, “Gosh, the mother (in the play) is really terrible, isn't she,” or something just to get a little “alpha-functioning” around the idea of cruelty, he'll look at m