ABSTRACT
A woman in her mid-twenties whom I will call Marge told her therapist that she needed psychotherapy because she was isolating herself from people. On the verge of marriage, she and her boyfriend often quarrelled and she was especially haunted by his remark that she didn’t know what she was saying. She was also particularly distressed by her mother’s apparent alliance with the boyfriend and by a recurrent maternal comment, ‘Don’t worry about her, she is just being dramatic’. Being in the midst of arguments had been a feature of her childhood as she and her brother had sided with one or another of the parents in their countless disputes.
