ABSTRACT
Mathew began treatment when he was 7½. From the beginning, he demonstrated to me both the tenacity of his grip on idealised images of his parents and the effect this had on his emotional stability. In his first session, he told me that he had two mothers and two fathers. He never saw his real father. He went away when Mathew was ‘this big’, and he indicated his foetal size with his hands. When I asked whether he would like to see his mother, Mathew looked at me in surprise and explained, as if to an idiot, ‘Well, I can't see through walls and through the sea.’ He asked me if I'd like to go through the sea. He wouldn’t. There are bad fishes in the sea. And he drew the bad fish's teeth. In fact, one tooth was so big it took up the entire page. Then he drew me at the side of the fish's tooth, and said if I got too close, I'd be eaten up and I'd be dead. ‘But you wouldn't be that silly,’ he reassured me. When I answered that maybe he was wondering whether I would be like a big bad fish who might kill him, he told me I couldn't be because there is no water, and besides, I have hair and feet. And he told me the baby fish fight, and all their blood and bones come out. It seemed Mathew had to protect his mother and himself from any responsibility for the distance between them by attributing all the violence and destructiveness to some imagined monster. And we can also see how this projection left Mathew in a very confused and vulnerable state, as he inhabited a very concrete world but one in which he seemed not to differentiate between inside phantasy and outside perceptions, thus living in quite a frightening dream world. He tried to reassure himself with tiny bits of reality, but it all had rather a hollow ring to it.
