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This Paper will be concerned with the analysis of a girl of 25 years of age. The different levels her transference shows are of particular interest, especially because she exemplifies a condition which Erich Neumann (1955, 1963) has described as a disturbance of primary relationship (Urbeziehungsstörung).
I can still see the intimidated creature—‘Miss B’ I shall call her—as, more than three years ago, she slunk along the walls of the psychiatric hospital. She revealed thereby how she felt pushed up against the wall by her surroundings. I still hear her feeble knocking on the door of my therapy room, even though before our first meeting it was practically inaudible.
I opened the door for her. Yet she did not appear in my field of vision because she was pressing herself up against the wall behind my door. I can still feel the sapless hand offered as greeting and in a split second withdrawn. The patient slunk inside, sat down and started to laugh, which, even though obviously a compulsion, seemed not without a certain charm. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and said in a tormented voice: ‘I can't bear it if you look at me’. (I later saw an exactly identical gesture in a film. In it a child therapist wanted to demonstrate her findings on psychic disturbances suffered by children, who from earliest childhood on had grown up in homes. Those children who had been out of touch with their mothers could not bear being looked at directly and would protect themselves against visual contact by raising their hands before their faces.)
Miss B. used to wear torn stockings and the end of a white tattered