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When I met Jean for the first session, I was struck by her appealing appearance. Short, pretty, with red hair and freckles, she exuded a genuine warmth, as smiling eyes snuck out from under long lashes and made contact. But then abruptly, after as smiling hello, the warmth vanished, and she quickly moved on into my office, in a fussy business-like way.
Jean, a 22-year-old single woman of Irish descent who lived with her parents, presented her problem in the initial session as a concrete and finite one: She wanted help in choosing a career. She was working at a secretarial job that she hated. She had graduated from college the year before, but despite countless hours of thinking about careers—she simply could not think of what she wanted to do. She acknowledged that she had a “decision-making problem” in general: “I can't even decide what to wear to work without asking my mother for her advice.” Other problems she listed with little affect or elaboration were: difficulty in breaking up with her boyfriend; difficulty in moving out of her parents’ house; and her relationship with her mother, about which she said, “I think we're abnormally attached.” Just the titles of her problems were delivered. It was as if she felt that was all that was needed for me to understand them and set to work on them.
She was compliant and appropriate. She seemed like a little grown-up, or like a latency-age child playing grown-up. She described a busyness to her life that sounded like a little girl playing house—cooking, doing laundry, going to the market, all at once. She