ABSTRACT
Some female patients have mothers who beat and physically torture them—the ultimate physical expressions of hatred—and yet these patients seemingly are bound to their mothers with such loyalty and love that an analyst can sometimes go for a year or more before even the first horror is whispered. The body does not seem to remember even as it refuses connection with the mind. When the experience is newly described to the analyst, in the picture frozen in time, the beating mother alone contains the empowered body hatred. The child in the scene is helpless and overwhelmed and often detaches herself from her body. Leonard Shengold (1989) has written extensively about the psychological vicissitudes of this kind of trauma. Most seasoned clinicians have treated a number of such cases and know what it is like to feel heartsick for their patients, exasperated in attempts to help them access even some anger at the attacker of old and feel frustrated in trying to modify their patients' guilt, dissociation, and self-criticism.
