ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the trajectory of the work with a girl—whom she will call Elva—who came to her when she was fourteen years old and worked with her for three years. Just as Rapunzel had been locked in her tower, Elva felt herself to be locked into an isolated existence in her room by her need to start separating and distinguishing herself from her parents. Elva was poised at the very pivotal moment in her life of leaving her childhood behind and had begun to free herself from total dependence on her parents, as she was emerging out of her latency period. Elva's reality was changing: she was growing up, and her bouts of anxiety increased in frequency and seriousness. In Elva's story there is a marked absence of the symbolic father, the father that functions to install the paternal law.
