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A white, single, professional woman of thirty came to my office some years ago seeking analysis. She had been helped by several years of psychotherapy but now more intensive treatment seemed indicated. Tall, with an angular, large-boned body structure which she carried in a perpetual slouch, she had a fair complexion and dark-blond hair which she wore in a simple, short style. Overall, she was an attractive woman in both manner and dress.
The presenting concerns were that she had difficulty in forming satisfying personal relationships with both men and women; in particular, she described herself as choosing inappropriate men with whom she had brief unsatisfying affairs. In addition, she was troubled by guilt, experienced inexplicable periods of loneliness and unhappiness, and had been unable to separate successfully from her parents. She was frightened by a series of accidents resulting in physical injury because she thought they were psychologically overdetermined. Medically she had a perplexing problem: over the years, a series of endocrinologists had diagnosed that either she did or did not have insufficient thyroid production and they either put her on or