A Developmentalist Perspective

The description of K.'s history as she presented it seems so negative: inhibitions, masochism, unhappy and restricted “throughout” childhood and adolescence, clinging to parents and brother, “always” feeling underappreciated, etc. that I found myself in response getting depressed about what I could do for her. I also wondered about the adequacy of her ego development in light of her claims that she has functioned so maladaptively and unsuccessfully, a thought I would view as in part a more or less objective clinical assessment but also as an example in the character transference of the kind of hopelessness this woman generates in others with her negative presentation. The choice of words Silverman used — “litany of complaints” — has a pejorative ring and spoke as well for the anger this woman generates in others; I had little difficulty empathizing with his feelings. Was she in fact ejected by her first therapist? Is this to be the transference-countertransference paradigm? Her insistence that life is unfair, in all ways, is an opening gambit; this is the history she elected to recount; it is an editorial, not a news story. Her history — as is true of all histories — is a symptom of her condition. My initial diagnostic impression would be of a woman at least partially interrupted developmentally prior