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Anna, Leaving Home” is a Vivid Portrait of how Psychoanalysis enabled an adolescent girl to psychologically separate sufficiently for her to leave home in a relatively uncomplicated way. Dr. Seidel argues that for an adolescent to leave home she needs to start from the base of a secure early attachment, to have a reasonably consolidated identity, and good affect tolerance. She must have begun to find avenues for sublimation and neutralization. Dr. Seidel uses the clinical process to illustrate how the re-working of early attachment issues of separation and loss can lead to the development of a solid platform from which to leave home.
Anna came into treatment, perhaps not surprisingly for a mid-adolescent girl, with an eating disorder and difficulty in making and sustaining age-appropriate sexual and social relationships with her peers. We learn that Anna's parents had a stormy and sexually charged relationship that dominated the household. Anna reported feeling abandoned by her mother from early on and that her father had been her primary, if sometimes sadistic, care giver. Anna had wet her bed until early adolescence.
Dr. Seidel gives us a picture of a girl caught in what she experiences as a simultaneously over-stimulating and depriving environment in which she feels unseen and unheard. A shared metaphor that developed between Anna and Dr. Seidel was that Anna was “starving” for nourishment in every form. Anna demonstrated a gift