ABSTRACT
Gabriella Grauso describes the gradual untangling of the painful psychic constellation locked inside the symptom of body dysmorphic disorder in an adolescent girl—namely, a hatred of the appearance of her eyes and nose. The analyst describes the gradual transformation of this obsession with release of pain in emotionally meaningful experience expressed in the transference through both drawings and language. This involved much work on the patient’s hatred of parental sexuality and the relation of that to the wish to cut off various bodily structures.
