ABSTRACT
I have in my care a 38-year-old bachelor who has been in my treatment for a few years. During therapy he had a fleeting unstable relationship with a 43-year-old female professor in France whom he often visited when he studied at the Sorbonne for his MA in philosophy. When at home, he looked after his elderly parents, his father a UK-born architect, while his mother, French born, worked as a medical secretary. His mother had a serious stroke with complications and had been found recently to have colon cancer. Ron, the only child of this couple, had a very close relationship with his loving, caring and accepting mother and had a somewhat distant, but decidedly respectful relationship with his father. Ron presented to me as an intelligent, somewhat self-effacing, shy but very sensitive person. Throughout psychotherapy he had been trying to extricate himself from his parents’ hold on him. Being an only child made this task particularly difficult. However, as therapy progressed, he was slowly able to take some concrete steps to become independent. He rented a flat with a close friend but then had to cope with loneliness and find ways to challenge his social anxiety.
