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I am looking back at an analysis of some 40 years ago. A 12-year-old boy came mentally broken down and left at his urgent insistence after 3 years, able to resume his life and his education, while maintaining a projective identification with Frankenstein.
I present this as a case study in order to ask questions about psychic limits. What was the nature of my patient’s recovery? What impelled his identification with Frankenstein? Were there inherent limits in his psyche requiring some such outcome? And my limitations? Would a different or better analysis have enabled a different type of outcome?
As told by his parents, Hugh was their youngest child, born when his mother was stressed by having to run a too-large house. At 6 weeks their housekeeper thought Hugh screamed because he needed a bottle to supplement breast feeding, but Hugh still screamed. Later, Hugh disliked and did little and poor work in a succession of schools and his education finally ceased when Father brought him home weeping and panic-stricken from a weekly boarding school. From then on Hugh stayed at home, unable to be alone, go out, or let his parents be out together. They told me he ruled the household. He had what they called ‘habits’, his chief one being collecting and keeping rubbish. His parents also told me that an elder son had been born with a physical disability and that, in regard to Hugh, they were
desperate that he obtain a good education. They were angry with Hugh (especially Mother) and frightened, as well as concerned and worried that they demanded too much of him.
Father brought Hugh to the first session. I saw a beautiful boy with a nice smile, rigid and sad, clinging to father. In the playroom Hugh was terrified and clung to a small chair. He gazed out of the window to empty his mind or looked, not at me or the furniture, but at the spaces between.
From his hovering gaze I could tell that these spaces seemed to him to be full of particles. He also showed feelings