[May 1998] Lucas

The patient is 35 years old, married, with two children. He is the fourth sibling in a family of six, with a gap of seven years between him and the next sibling. During the time when he was the youngest in the family his father suffered from deafness, which made my patient experience him as an absent father; the mother and the children arranged their lives as they liked. Then his father was operated on, and two more children were born. This change was lived by the patient as being rejected; he distanced himself from his family and took a job, which for him meant triumphing over his father, who advised him to study. He did a series of temporary jobs and was finally given a post in the family business as administrator. There he felt looked down upon and not taken into account, and so he left. He started to drink and take drugs; he blames his parents’ lack of interest in him for his drug habit; they are, in fact, not even aware of what has happened to him. He fell in love with a woman and promised her he would quit taking drugs.