Boredom: Unprocessed Pain in the Treatment of a Narcissistic Boy and His Family

The topic of this panel is boredom and how one manages it in a creative way. My initial thought on hearing the topic was that I had a perfect case—a nine-year-old boy whom I had been seeing since he was six and about to enter first grade. Henry was—is—a narcissistically vulnerable boy whose individual sessions were frequently painfully boring. I believe that the kind of “boredom” I experienced is familiar to all of you who have treated people, not just children, with narcissistic character disorders. He is the type of patient whom Phyllis Beren describes so well in her writing on narcissistic children and that Shelly Bach describes so beautifully in his writings on narcissistic adults. Although there were certain significant changes in the experience of boredom over the course of the treatment. I still found myself, even toward the end of the treatment, frequently feeling that I was barely able to tolerate sitting with Henry in the individual sessions. This was true even though his functioning improved to such an extent that we were able to end the therapy this past summer. Although the writing of this paper has been helpful, I still feel, as I felt at the end of the treatment, that there was something very central I did not fully understand. I hope perhaps that the responses to my article in the discussion during this panel will help clarify the issues a bit more.