ABSTRACT
Laura was deeply and traumatically disappointed each time she fell in love. During her adolescence and young adulthood, Laura was assaulted by repeated cycles of traumatic disappointment, as she would become infatuated with, or fall in love with, women unattainable to her, both gay and straight. She would begin by idealizing and idolizing these alluring and “exciting object” women, and then after the disappointment in their rejection and unavailability she would devalue them, already being engaged in adoring another. The cycle would repeat itself again and again. Prior to analysis it seemed that the cycle would never end, and that she would constantly be torn away from her life and her real relationships by overwhelming longings for an unavailable mother-lover, the artist mother goddess of her dreams. She feared she would perpetually suffer the search to refind a lost love object, which was based on an internal object fantasy of her mother, in both her preoedipal and oedipal level dimensions.
