ABSTRACT
Although the letters continued unabated throughout the course of the work, this chapter will concentrate on specific references to the letters in the letters themselves, as they took on a life of their own. In fact, they developed beyond being a channel of communication and connection into a particular vehicle through which the work of therapy was aided, as well as further enhanced and elaborated. Here too I lose the chronology by focusing on the specific content of the meaning of writing letters during intensive ongoing therapy for this patient. This section will contain segments from some years before the
work came gradually to an end and about half way after the full engagement of the work. Using fragments from the letters themselves is the most powerful and graphic way to show how they developed and what function they served. One of the ‘gifts’ in this work is in fact the patient’s capacity to write from a number of points of view, the central one being how she is able not only to use words but to capture in them, and therefore open the window to, her internal experience and life. The early letters have already been referred to in Chapter 2, some of
the sequences giving a sense of their content, continuity and the ‘flow’. During the first sequence, half of the work, the majority of the
letters were written with the voice of the ‘little girl’. The tone of these early letters also captures something of the emotional quality of the therapy in the room. This state of the Ego, elaborated elsewhere, in many ways is the most predominant way in which she related to me. It was her internal state of regression, the part of her seeking the ‘better mother’, and that which had originally drawn her to me – seeing me as warm, wise and containing, as well as being able
to understand her. For a large part of the work she held onto the phantasy that I would be her ‘new mother’, a mother of choice, and that if she were my ‘little girl’ she would grow up well and healthy.
