ABSTRACT
The development of the ego involves locomotion. Emotional separation from the mother is necessary, and this is enhanced greatly when the child can first crawl and then finally walk away and still survive. A compulsion to repeat the traumata of childhood and fulfil the promise of being rescued by parents can make for a masochistic clinging to punishment and a holding onto one’s past and the parents of one’s past. A often mentioned this short portentous journey to the bathroom in subsequent sessions, always reporting it matter-of-factly without any passion, and almost always with the original tag of metaphoric slang: “the time she showed me her bush”. By reducing the event to a cliche, he was avoiding his emotions. “The jungle” had been too full of a terrible mixture of excitement and fear for the child, and later the adult, to be allowed into consciousness, but he had only begun the battle to own after years of analysis.
