Loathsome Women

The sonorous diagnosis of neuroses secundum ordinem is just a façade, it is not the psychotherapist's real diagnosis.

This paper is concerned with half a dozen women patients who were under treatment during the same period of time. They were actually, or potentially, suicidal, and their analyses involved a good deal of upheaval. An outstanding feature of these women was that they were “loathed” by everybody, including the analyst. My diagnosis is, therefore, “loathsome women” rather than any other psychiatric category.1 It will be shown throughout this paper, until its very end, how the leading idea of “loathing” assists the therapeutic goal. An attempt will be made to describe these patients in the vernacular and to give some details regarding the transference and counter-transference. Particular emphasis will be laid on the manner in which the archetypes are constellated in the analysis. It will also be demonstrated that the analyst cannot avoid being drawn into this constellation, nay, that he needs to react to it. In this way it will become clear how certain myths unravel themselves in the analytical process.

As regards the choice of words in which particular notions are to be clothed (or cloaked), it has been emphasized on other occasions (Stein, L., 1949, 1954) that words, like other signs and symbols, carry with them ancient meanings which, though often unconscious, direct their usage. Thus the verb “to loathe”, rather than similar terms, has been chosen on purpose. As is well known, the verb “to loathe” means to hate, to detest, to be filled with horror at, or disgust by, to feel a strong aversion to. It will be necessary to ponder particularly over the feeling of horror and aversion. The kindred word “loath”—hostile, hateful, unpleasant—is cognate to the German word leid—misery, pain, misfortune, suffering. With this is to be compared modern English “I am loath to” and the Old English construction: me is lath—it is hateful, unpleasant to me, I