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The clinical material presented here concerns a woman with a traumatic past (violence and early exposure to sexuality by her parents) and an unhappy couple relationship. The predominant theme of the sessions is the physical violence inflicted by the patient on her daughters, as a repetition and continuation of the trauma that she herself sustained in the past.
Unable to cope with life, the patient expects her children to be the providers of positive elements and reassurance for her. Because such a mother can face neither her own despair nor her children’s demands, she hates her children and constantly beats them.
Considered in these terms, the patient’s hate for her own mother seems to be due not so much to the sexual promiscuity or physical violence to which she was exposed, as to the fact that her mother had been able neither to cope with her own life nor to help the patient learn to cope with hers.
Such families are not uncommon. The children are required to reassure their parents and to motivate them to carry on living; in this way, the trauma is repeated from generation to generation.
The sessions presented here show that, alongside the violence, there is also a suffering part of the patient that seeks help from the analyst.
One of the themes of the supervision is the search for possible ways of breaking the vicious circle of the compulsion to repeat the trauma in subsequent generations.
ANALYST. Anna is a good-looking woman of about 40, married with two daughters. She has three elder brothers and a sister. Her mother is 70 years old and her father has been dead for some years.
Anna was born in a country town and the first few years of her life bore the stamp of promiscuity and violence. Her seriously alcoholic father was constantly making terrifying scenes, which either culminated
in physical violence or turned into equally violent sexual approaches to his wife. Anna remembers with a mixture of horror and jealousy how the violence of the glances exchanged between