Parent Loss and Internalized Terrorism: Implications for Development, Transference, and Resistance

This clinical paper expounds upon the well-established utility of transference interpretations in general and specifically delineates resistances to their use; resistances that arose because of the analysand’s traumatic loss of her mother. The timing and violent nature of her mother’s death highlighted the developmental relevance of her premorbid, triangulated dynamic with her parents. That is, the opportunity that uncomplicated development affords with regard to working through one’s pre- and post-oedipal conflicts was unavailable to her. Rather, her mother’s untimely death left unresolved the guilty pleasure she had derived from her status as her mother’s impassioned rival and her father’s gratified, oedipal daughter. Moreover, her father’s parallel guilt and trauma led him to withdraw his affection from her such that in effect, he too was lost to her. Ultimately, she resisted mourning her losses and retained her dead objects inside, consistent with melancholia. She did not easily relinquish this position and in fact, only did so in the context of the analyst functioning as both a new developmental and transference object.1