I am (not) The Little Mermaid: a case report

Dias, Maria do Rosário

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/15382

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Authors

Dias, Maria do Rosário

Abstract(s)

"Sarah, currently aged 14Y: 3M, is a late child of a socially differentiated couple, who were already the parents of monozygotic female twins, aged 13Y at the time Sarah was born. Sarah had experienced “double parenting” for years due to her twin sisters, who sequestered and took hold of her under the nonchalant and emotionally detached eyes of her biological parental couple and which led to the development of an identity based on a cleaving of her Self, often projected in repeated drawings of the ‘little mermaid’. Sarah underwent four years of psychoanalytical psychotherapy, initiated in the sequence of marked complaints concerning socialization problems with her peers and school phobia. After a one-year interruption, Sarah resumed therapy reactively electing a symptom linked to anorectic behaviours and a refusal to grow up and which concealed a means of enacting some familial power, and through rescuing her ‘lost identity’ established a place that was duly hers in the family nucleus. The ruthlessness and the obsessive nature of her anorectic behaviour, assumed as a means of control, had materialized into a vicious sadomasochist circle (she controlled herself so as to be free from control, but ended up being controlled as a result of that very self-control). Such behavior resulted in her being committed to a psychiatric institution on three separate occasions, due to manifest and already life-threatening weight loss. It was the therapist’s responsibility to rescue and preserve the healthy part of Sarah’s Self-revealed in the course of the therapy sessions, in stark opposition to the other pathological and cleaved Self that presented during her institutionalization. Through psychotherapeutic relational attachment, the healthy and salubrious parts of her Self (those which both possess and induce health) have allowed for the structuring of a new relational object, thus consenting to the ‘sealing of the identity cleft’ and the development of her personality."