Case Material: ‘Valeria’

From the Clinical Commentaries Editors:

In the forward to Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940, Jung wrote: ‘When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien - but it just becomes all the more dangerous. The urge of what had been split-off to unite with you becomes all the stronger. The best stance would be: ‘Please, come and devour me!“

We find the following vignette relevant to a time in which children across the world suffer anxieties born of war, famine, oppression and occupation, environmental hazard and pandemic. Whether these anxieties stem from cultural, familial, or internal conflict, analytic containment and integration support the capacity to turn and face that split-off, alien ‘something’ that keeps on pursuing, be it a savage bull, a lion, a wolf or … a crocodile.

As an eight-year-old, Valeria came to the sessions accompanied by her nanny, who provided her with continuous 24-hour care. This included having nanny sleep with her as she was afraid to be alone, fearing someone would ‘get her’ and ‘scare her’. Valeria's mother states, ‘When I was pregnant with Valeria, I didn't want to have her. I thought … once again, I am nine months pregnant with this crazy man’. The mother also describes having to travel during her pregnancy with Valeria because Valeria's older brother needed kidney surgery. The youngest of three living children, Valeria had two elder siblings who did not survive, the oldest having died during pregnancy due to syphilis transmitted from the biological father and the other from an amniocentesis procedure.

At the time of our first visit, Valeria's biological father, a very wealthy businessman with an addiction to stimulants, and her mother, a housewife, were in the midst of a tumultuous divorce. The couple had been separated since Valeria was three and, though Valeri