ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of Barbara. Barbara was under the ascendancy of a compulsion to repeat the structure of the original trauma: that of a symbiotic narcissistic relationship with an omnipotent mother imago, only imagined and reconstructed retroactively, expressed and verbalised by the patient after the experience of the dream. All Barbara wanted was to restore and re-live the original narcissistic bubble, the idealised, symbiotic, quasi-delusional relationship with her mother. Barbara came from a small seaside town in Northern Australia, a place of great contrast between the world of white Australians and that of the “blacks” – as the Aboriginal people were referred to. A multiplicity of specific triangular scenes unfold in the telling of Barbara’s story. Barbara was powerfully invested in a primary identification with a maternal imago, which was experienced only in extreme terms: either as an idealised good object or as a thoroughly persecuting and/or damaged bad one.
