Discussion: “A Family with Oedipal Dynamics” by Li Yanling, with David E. Scharff

I want to thank Dr Li Yanling and Dr David Scharff for asking me to discuss this rich and interesting clinical case. The case belongs to a supervision group from the Beijing Continuous Program in Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Therapy, which Dr Scharff directs. The author's title addresses the type of dynamics they have found between the members of the family along with the clinical work done with them. They presume it is an oedipal way of approaching communication within the family.

We are told in the initial notes about the case that the twenty-six-year-old female doctor student, Hu Li, had a mental crisis during some weeks. Her emotional state did not let her approach her studies in a proper manner, fearing she would be unable to graduate. We are then presented with a series of details relating to the family history. From the author's perspective, and by the way the clinical material is given, we presume that the therapist gives importance to the background details of the patient and her parents. We are given many clinical details about both parents' lives, and from the interventions and setting she selected, we learn that the analyst has the idea that Hu Li's symptoms have much to do with her parent's lives and with the way in which her subjectivity was achieved in the interactive links of the world which she grew up in.

We are given rich details which lead us to understand that the daughter and mother had a close relationship, with little interaction with the father, who seems to have been eagerly interested in work and social engagements attendant on his work. The mother recalls the years in which she was bringing up her child without her husband's presence as “the happy ones” in her home town from which she had to move when the family reunited, or we may say the group was at last able to live together, the three of them as a family. Hu Li leaves for college after finishing high school and Mr Hu was promoted at the same time to a better position in his work wh