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

dc.contributor.authorDias, Maria do Rosário
dc.date.accessioned2016-11-11T10:13:15Z
dc.date.available2016-11-11T10:13:15Z
dc.date.issued2016-09
dc.description.abstract"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."pt_PT
dc.identifier.citationMaria do Rosário Dias. “I am (not) The Little Mermaid: A Case Report”. EC Psychology and Psychiatry 1.4 (2016): 109-117.pt_PT
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/15382
dc.language.isoengpt_PT
dc.peerreviewedyespt_PT
dc.publisherECroniconpt_PT
dc.relation.publisherversionhttps://www.ecronicon.com/ecpp/volume1-issue4.phppt_PT
dc.subjectAnorectic behaviourspt_PT
dc.subjectIdentitypt_PT
dc.subjectCleaved selfpt_PT
dc.subjectRelational bondingpt_PT
dc.titleI am (not) The Little Mermaid: a case reportpt_PT
dc.typejournal article
dspace.entity.typePublication
oaire.citation.endPage117pt_PT
oaire.citation.startPage109pt_PT
oaire.citation.titleEC Psychology and Psychiatrypt_PT
oaire.citation.volume1(4)pt_PT
rcaap.rightsopenAccesspt_PT
rcaap.typearticlept_PT

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