You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Jane plays out a scene in which she kills her mother so that her father's energy will be fully restored, permitting the two of them to have more fun. She is sure that he is ineffectual and withdrawn because of something her mother is doing to him. After Jane has dispatched her mother, however, she feels worried: first, father is no different, and second, she knows that what she did was wrong. “I'm going to do it a little differently this time,” she announces. “I shall only tie up Mother and put her in a cage. I won't kill her after all.” Many variations on this theme then preoccupy us.
Jane was six years old and had been in analysis for two years when the above scene took place. Whenever Jane “killed,” she took the name “Lou” for herself, as a shortened form of “Luigi,” although at other times, she used “Lou” to mean “Louisa.” In our work together, we came to know a lot about these names. During this play, I was the teacher who kept an eye on Lou, but Louisa knew how to “wrap him [me] around her finger.”
As I described in an earlier paper on bisexuality involving the analysis of an adult male (Herzog 1998), the transference and countertransference in Jane's analysis were tutored directly by the gendered self, which was expressed in the analytic play. In such cases, the gendered self is also influential insofar as it manifests in the analyst's flexibility or intransigence when he or