Comment On ‘Struggles with the “Other One”’ by N. Eide-Midtsand

This Delightful Paper is based on the premise that symptoms bear a meaningful message from the self, and that the shadow can contain the repressed, positive part of the personality. Mr Eide-Midtsand regards the shadow impulses of this frightened, girlish boy as masculine, while setting aside consideration of whether aggression and protest are common to both sexes. What strikes a London-trained reader like me is that the therapist does not interpret the transference, so that the struggle towards integration is seen in impersonal terms: Dan struggles with the ‘Other One’, rather than with the therapist, on to whom he projects internalised aspects of the parents who abandoned him when he was eighteen months old, and of the great-aunt who then brought him up. Nor does the therapist make explicit the link between the boy's communications in symptoms and play and his body urges and impulses. The phantasies are not seen as essentially body-based, even though it is clear that his obsessional need to sterilise the bedclothes by freezing them, his fear of developing spots on his fingers and later his terror of the toy snake, have to do with his genital and masturbatory impulses: they must be strenuously repressed because they were viewed as evil by his great-aunt, who educated him to suppress anger and other manifestations of his ‘inborn sin’. This disembodied-style of conceptualising is one that we are now familiar with in the International Workshop on Analytical Psychology in Childhood and Adolescence, which has met three times. While London Jungian child analysts are deeply influenced by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion and, above all, Fordham, and Berlin-trained child analysts interpret the transference in a framework based on both Freudian and Jungian thought, the analysts from the United States, Switzerland, Italy and France, being more strictly Jungian in approach, tend to take the ‘archetypal’ stance illustrated in this paper. I like the analogy made by Mara Sidoli after