ABSTRACT
Beatriz is a young and vital woman, passionate about studies and on her way to start a new life abroad when she begins to experience physical problems that lead to delirious interpretations. The need to face a new and unfamiliar environment on her own brought out the immature parts of the Self and led to a crisis of personality disintegration. Although the situation was quite serious in terms of the delirious ideation, the themes of the delirium clearly showed her true suffering, her autistic experiences and her need to hide these – even to herself.
Once the acute phase was overcome, the contradictions of feelings of love and hate that got in the way of her affective relationships started to emerge: these represented a sort of labyrinth from which she could not escape.
The protective armour of autism had required Beatriz to exert a tremendous amount of intellectual effort. Her academic success had served as a protective mask against the experience of non-being and the early experience of a hostile and indifferent world. The difficulty in her relationships arose from the confusion of her internal objects, and emerged in a dream in which ‘backwards love’ led to the death of a man.
