The Clinical Significance of the Single Parent Relationship in Women

The death of her father when the patient was a year old was a significant event of traumatic character for the patient. The mother invested her libidinal cathexis in her remaining object, the patient, after the loss of her husband to whom she had been closely attached. This intense emotional investment was inimical to the natural development of the patient, who in turn became attached to the mother with abnormal intensity.

The mother's depression following her husband's death must have been sensed by the patient and was remembered by her in retrospect through the old, bleak, haunted houses which constantly recurred in the many dreams about her mother. Following the period of mourning the mother concentrated her interest upon the patient. She permitted the patient, for example, to remain on the breast for almost three years. During these three years of overindulgence there were planted the seeds of that oral dependence which was to become one of the basic factors in the patient's subsequent neurosis. Between the ages of three and six the patient led a happy, carefree life in which she already showed evidences of identification with aggressive, dominating personalities, such as the maternal grandmother. During the period while she was ill with tuberculosis, between the ages of six and twelve, there occurred a reactivation of the oral dependence characteristics of early infancy. Tuberculosis having been the disease of which her father died, this illness became an added factor in her identification with her dead father and contributed to her further dependence upon and fear of mother. A paralyzing ambivalence towards the mother developed, which was subsequently displaced upon other individuals and into the analytic situation.