ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case study of Kelly. Kelly was the second of four children and had clearly been very seriously neglected as a child. A vivid illustration of this was the way that, when she was six years old, she had fallen on her head in the playground area of a park and evidently been concussed, but neither of her parents were around, either in the park or at home. In addition to being neglected, she also seems to have been press-ganged into looking after her younger siblings. Her masochism, hiding under the hippie New-Age banner of being “natural” was evidently still hell-bent on sacrificing the potential child on the altar of self-sufficiency and control. Her motto was a perverse interpretation of John Bunyan’s line, “He that is down need fear no fall”. This highlights the importance of Freud’s seminal paper, “A child is being beaten”: where there is sadomasochistic pathology, there is always a child being abused.
