Beyond Love and Money: Response to Discussion

Dr. Heineman's discussion was one of the most illuminating commentaries on my work I have ever encountered. Most important, she answered my question about the location of the “bad” object in my work with Geraldine simply and clearly, by noting how Geraldine was revealing a sense of overwhelming destructiveness in her narrative of her personal history. This narrative, her life itself, was founded on the idea that she had destroyed her mother's life by being born. Once one recognizes this feeling of destructiveness, a core issue in the therapy is framed: Will Geraldine and I survive her destructiveness, thus providing a chance of reworking this core aspect of her being? In this connection, the question about me, representing her internal object, has to do with my strength, my survivability.

I regret to say that Geraldine stopped coming to sessions shortly after this case presentation. I would now interpret her termination of our work as reflecting unmanageable anxiety that we would not be able to survive her destructiveness, to contain it within our relationship. Perhaps my failure to recognize her sense of destructiveness in our early sessions itself was interpreted by Geraldine as evidence that I lacked the ability to contain, to survive her destructive impact. I look back and imagine myself sitting in the room with her, listening to her account of her own beginnings, recognizing the feeling that her very existence had so disrupted her mother's life. The despair attendant to this recognition would indeed have been hard to bear. It would have been even more difficult to say something to Geraldine that contained this horrible recognition. Geraldine camouflaged her sense of destructiveness, hiding it from both me and from herself, in a discussion of why she was so determined not to have a child at too young an age. I was focused on Geraldine's wish not to repeat her mother's mistakes. If my reverie, at the time, had been more free to float, I would surely have lit upon