Case Response III

My thanks to Valeria's therapist for the rich material she has offered and to the Journal of Analytical Psychology for this opportunity to engage with it.

I trained with the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts and work in private practice specializing in seeing adults with (often severe and enduring) eating disorders and/or disorders of the self and am aware of an important difference between Valeria and the people I see. Having a nanny who provided a stable presence amidst the chaos and hostility of her early childhood, plus four years of analysis from age eight means that, although very lost at 18, Valeria is not severely eating-disordered or exercising compulsively against medical advice, as I imagine she otherwise might be.

Clearly there are many ways of thinking about the case material. However, the subject of my Ph.D. was women's aggressive fantasies and, given the Editors' quote from Jung which warns against splitting-off savage, animal parts of ourselves, as well as Valeria's therapist's evident awareness of her analysand's struggle with aggression and destructiveness, these themes are my focus.

Valeria's crocodile dream reminds me of a contribution a woman in her 50s made to my Ph.D. research. Calling herself Sara, she linked having learnt to act submissively, being anorexic for over a decade, and ‘wasting four decades being someone she was not’. She described having to push down her aggressive, demanding, defiant energies in order to be submissive, and that anorexia had been her way of doing so. This was an extreme solution to the terrifying problem of what to do with these energies, which felt like they were ‘a ferocious, wild animal’ about to destroy her. Likewise, a number of eating-disordered analysands have described wanting to ‘rip their skin off’ to stop a crazy-making, unbearable bodily energy, which makes me think of the psoriasis that contributed to Valeria coming back into analysis at 18.

Valeria's dream also brings to mind an ana