ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of Rose, Who was a married woman, in her late forties, with adult children, interested in further professional development, and was attending suitable courses to that end. She did show distress in our initial session, recalling how anxious she was between the ages of 13–16, fearing that she would die, but, with later insight, she came to know that much of this anxiety arose from repressed hostility towards both her mother and her older sister. Absences that seemed to be intolerable in childhood were being explored and faced in the consulting room. During her first three years of therapy, many of the absences were accounted for because of heart and chest problems and constant bouts of infections. The expectations of continuity, availability, and contact, constantly thwarted by the frustrations of absence, solitude, and discontinuity were the scenarios of Rose’s bleak childhood.
