ABSTRACT
João's mother telephoned me in the autumn of 1998, saying that she was worried about her nine-year-old son and wondered if she could come to talk to me about him. I indicated that it would be a good idea if her husband could come along also. She told me that he was away on a business trip and she very much wanted to talk to me as soon as possible, so I gave her an appointment for two days later. She is an attractive woman in her late thirties, well dressed and slightly over made-up. There was something a bit anxious and irritating in her manner. I detected a subtle hostility in her, which provoked some negativism in me. I was bothered about my reaction to her, which I questioned. She spoke in broken, heavily accented English, and never spoke to me in her mother tongue in spite of the clear indication that I also spoke it. She is the youngest of a family of four girls and she described a rather typical, close Portuguese family background. She told me that she was quite concerned about her youngest son who, for the last few months, had 74been exhibiting a somewhat precocious and provocative sexual behaviour, i.e. talking about sex, making sexual gestures, easily stripping off his clothes, using four-letter words, etc. João was also very jealous of his thirteen-year-old brother Xavier, and kept complaining that his parents favoured him. He also said he was unhappy at home. On the other hand—she said—he was very popular at school, where both his peers and his teachers, apparently, thought highly of him. He admired his older brother enormously and got on well with him. The relationship with his father, though, was not so good. She seemed perplexed by the fact that, although he claimed not to like his father, his behaviour became worse when father was absent, like now, for instance. Xavier, on the other hand, gave them no reason to worry. I suggested we should meet again when her husband returned. She said she would try her best to persuade him to come; he travelled often and worked all the time so she did not know if he would find the time.
