You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper is mainly about once-a-week therapy with a boy who dramatized heroic deeds. It starts with developing a comparison I made between some of Jung's concepts and those of Melanie Klein, with the intention of showing that the descriptive concepts of Klein were congruent with some Jungian theory and description. That Miranda Davis succeeds in demonstrating. She starts off with an equation between heroic deeds and manic defence and uses the Kleinian conceptions of projective identification and intrusive identification adding a heading ‘Exclusion’, a term of her own which seems apt.
The adolescent boy has an interesting history. His mother formed a close and intimate relation with him when aged 4 years, substituting him for her husband who had left her. Four years later she married again and ‘excluded’ her son and gave birth to a daughter. Some six years later Mischa seduced his half sister, the police were called in and the boy was removed from home (second exclusion). When returned he repeated the exercise and was removed permanently, though controlled contact with the family was maintained (third exclusion).
In her interviews with Mischa, Miranda found the continuous stream of stories about his heroic exploits in an organized group game called ‘role play’ intrusive: the monologue left no space for thought or reflection and it was only when this diminished that she could intervene therapeutically. It appears that his ‘exclusions’ had made him react with violent attempts to break into the family and regain the earlier possession of his mother. That was repeated with Miranda during his therapy, causing her much distress and mindless confusion; he also attempted to take possession of the staff in the clinic. In addition this scenario was played out with Mischa's girl friends who recurrently rejected him, presumably because of his intrusiveness.
This paper is interesting not only because of the case material but also methodologically. It was a pleasure to read in a cl