You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
J came to see me six years ago in distress about violence. She was in a destructive relationship with an alcoholic and compulsively unfaithful man. Her encounters with this man had become increasingly violent, violence in which she participated by baiting him and hitting him in their drunken rages.
J is a middle-aged beauty with patrician features; dark, well-cut hair; and hazel eyes. Her dress is either casual urban chic—good slacks and Armani jackets with the sleeves rolled—or raggedy blue jeans and boots, her “cowgirls-get-the-blues” look. She brings her big old dog to sessions, a loving black retriever. A year and a half ago, J agreed to be an analytic control case and come to treatment four hours per week.
J grew up on an isolated farm with her intact family: parents, an older sister, and two younger siblings, a boy and a girl. Her father, charming and charismatic, was also an alcoholic womanizer. Many people from political, literary, and theatrical circles visited the farm. J says, “There were two different groups of people at our home: interesting artists and intellectuals and vicious alcoholics. The same people belonged to both groups depending on the amount of alcohol consumed.” In the grip of alcoholic states, the father and mother physically battered each other, violent encounters that J and her siblings witnessed. The father also beat the children in unregulated rages.
Her mother, the daughter of a socially prominent family, suffers from schizophrenia. J remembers her childhood mother as drunk, ineffective, violent, and not much involved in child-rearing. Once, during J's adolescence, the mother went on a rampage and trashed