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The type of childhood trauma presented in this paper was best publicized in the literature and cinema by The Diary of Anne Frank. The physical circumstances and wartime background of my patient was similar except that she was younger and survived. There are few references in the analytic literature to the most fortunate survivors, those children whose families were left intact and spent the war years together in a relatively benign situation of hiding.
Generally speaking, we call a person “well-adapted” if the productive capacity, the ability to enjoy life, and the mental equilibrium are undisturbed (Hartmann, 1958). Hartmann noted that adaptation “is a reciprocal relationship between the organism and its environment” (p. 24). Hartmann quotes Parr in suggesting that “‘where the real functions, determined jointly by the organism's whole mechanism and by its environment, are favorable for its survival … a relationship of adaptation obtains between that organism and its environment’” (p. 24).
In my patient, the circumstances of hiding, close relationship with family, the war, and survival, provided me with an opportunity to observe an adaptation for survival in a childhood that became the bedrock of a future character neurosis. The childhood adaptations that supported escape from capture became the future resistances in the analytic situation.
Mrs. A, born in 1934, was the first child of a wealthy couple who lived in a German city. A screen memory emerged of a sun-filled apartment that exuded warmth. The sun shone through windowed