ABSTRACT
How does one bring such a long and complex story to a conclusion? The almost fairy tale finish was just about more than one could have wished for. Jane’s goals were to become less continually anxious, less self-conscious and so easily filled with shame and embarrassment. My goals were to free her from the raft of problems that she carried, to liberate the dissociated parts and in short let her find and become herself. When she started therapy with me, Jane indicated persecutory and
delusional views of herself and how others saw and experienced her. She lacked the mirroring of an adult and competent self. In her mind, her family would have thought of her as the awkward, and difficult to relate to, child or at the worst moments as a ‘devil’s’ child. I speculated that her mother could have projected some of her split views of herself, including the ‘devil’s child’, onto Jane. This name (‘the devil’s child’) was Jane’s term for the dissociated part that contained the worst of the monster that she felt herself to be. Jane’s perception of her first husband’s view of her was that he
had long lost any positive feeling for her, probably swinging from seeing her as a nuisance and interference to his life to a burden and responsibility who needed to be got rid of. Similarly she felt her friends and colleagues, were ambivalent about her. Those with positive and loving feelings for her were unable to counteract Jane’s overall feelings of inadequacy, unlovability and self-loathing that she carried around about herself most of the time. I saw her initially as an extremely stressed, uncertain and anxious person who lacked confidence in herself and felt herself to be vulnerable and sensitive to others’ views of her acceptability or otherwise. Against this relational background, what was to emerge once
most of her transferential feelings towards me were resolved, was a
woman becoming able to achieve a loving relationship with a suitable man that was reciprocated, fulfilling and sustainable. This was a fitting conclusion to the long intense relational work and great struggles we had engaged in, to create an intimate relationship within which she came to know herself and to be herself: to find her capacity to become the loving, generous and extremely able person that she was capable of being. Once we had turned the corner, and reached the depths of her distress towards completing a fourth year of therapy, Jane began to move rapidly towards cutting down on her sessions and eventually over the final eighteen months seeing me for a once or twice a year check-up. About two years after we formally finished, when it was clear that the
work was complete, we met for several hours in a neutral place so that we could reflect together on what had happened, what had been achieved andwhat if anything we would dowith reporting on the work. We needed to consider how to capture some of what had been
written in the letters and how to bring our long, close therapeutic work to an end. In this meeting we both recognised the value of reporting and publishing aspects of the therapy, as an aid and inspiration to others and for professionals engaged in this gratifying but complex work. However, before achieving this ending we had to negotiate a
number of crises of confidence, and a not unexpected wish to end prematurely rather than confront the meaning of our finishing the work and Jane’s long reliance on me – both in reality and in her inner world. It meant giving up phantasies, wishes, and projections that had become life-sustaining for most of her life.
