ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the parental ghosts that support and feed our patients’ phantasies in a dramatic game of mirroring and alienation. Luisa first showed her symptom at age three, when she had to change kindergarten because the previous one had been shut down, her sister Sara was born, and, at the age of forty days, had fallen ill with a face tumour. In her phantasy, Luisa attacked her “sister-in-the-arms-of-beautiful-mummy” and is haunted by a “double-headed-monster-sister”. Giovanni is certain of having eaten, sucked up, his potential little sister when he was in his mother’s belly with her, according to his unconscious phantasy, supported in this by his parents’ more or less conscious delusional story of the birth of their only child. Luisa and Giovanni are on the threshold of pre-oedipal and oedipal rivalry, a triangular, more evolved form of the sibling complex, but they do not seem capable of enduring this position and rapidly regress to a more archaic form.
