Case Material: “Chloe”

Whatever must have raced through Demeter's mind? How does one liberate a young girl's sense of her sexual self when it has been abducted by the appetite of others, by the girl's very search for belonging? Entrapment and liberation entangled.

I was a 14-year-old girl reading Lolita. There wasn't a whole lot separating me from Dolores Hayes. She was from New England, same as me. She liked to gorge on sweets and movie magazines. And I liked to watch MTV while drinking can after can of diet soda. The logic was easy to follow. If Humbert could see something extraordinary in Dolores maybe a man could see something in me. More than anything I wanted to be seen, paid attention to, picked out of a crowd…. I wanted to be worshipped from a distance for simply existing.

(Kate Elizabeth Russell, “Maison Nymphette,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century, J. M. Quigley, Ed.)

Constance Romero & Laura Tuley

Chloe entered treatment with me when she was 17 years old. This process began in 2008 and spanned five years with a break of 18 months in the middle of treatment.

In the course of these five years and as a desperate attempt to grasp for love, Chloe engaged in progressive non-normative sexual behaviours which included modelling implied nudes, full nudes and taking part in pornographic films. She progressed to providing sexual “fetish” services. Finally, with her mother's prompting (as the mother would get financial kickbacks), Chloe became a high-end escort. Intertwined with these acute sexual defensive manoeuvres

was a vicious cycle of compulsive dissociative behaviours, including a binge- eating disorder, over-exercising, lying, and hair pulling.

During the first session, I experienced Chloe as a very sad and despondent adolescent. When I asked her to tell me about herself, she stated she had been binge-eating with no vomiting since she was 12 years old. Af