ABSTRACT
The 32-year-old patient, let’s call her Sandra, opted for psychotherapy, as she had an abortion in the eighth week of pregnancy a few months earlier and was very sad about this loss. Her life seemed to stand still; she was depressed and could not decide which way her life should go, professionally or relationally. Everything was questioned: the profession, the marriage, and herself. She was in a deep crisis. Opposite me sat a slim, smartly dressed young woman. She sat down sideways so she could not look at me without turning her head. When she turned, she looked with wide eyes but didn’t really see me. She spoke haltingly, more to herself, and complained about the unborn child that she had wanted so much. Her posture was insecure and inhibited. I asked about other feelings. She said: ‘I am confused, I can’t understand why such a thing could happen’. The relationship with her husband was presently distant; he understood her grief, but did not understand why she was still blocked and why she now also doubted her work and the relationship. They often had disputes; his opinion was life goes on. She felt guilty towards him because on the one hand she knew he was right, but on the other hand she was paralysed. Her gynaecologist advised her not to wait too long to get pregnant again. However, the client did not dare to try. She didn’t understand her behaviour, why she had slipped into this fundamental crisis; she looked again and again absently out of the window during the first session, as if she were cocooned in her own world – sad, depressed and not understanding herself. The anamnesis revealed that her grandmother had given birth to the mother under harsh and poor conditions on a farm. The grandparents were fighting for survival, there had been epidemics among their
livestock and they often worked late into the night to feed their numerous children. The grandfather died early due to a stroke, so the grandmother had to raise the children alone. The older siblings helped her as much as they could. The mother herself was one of the younger siblings. She constantly suffered under the fear that the family would be torn apart, and she felt ashamed when the village children picked on her and laughed at her shabby clothes. Sandra told this story with a detached tone, as if everything, as said, were wrapped in a cocoon. Her mother married early and gave birth to three children, a girl and two boys. In the former boom-time both parents worked a lot to become moderately prosperous and have a secure income. Therefore, they asked the grandmother to watch the kids while they went to work. The two brothers were extraverted, active and sporty children, much to the delight of the grandmother. Sandra, however, developed into an introverted child who was prone to daydreaming and preferred playing with dolls. The grandmother and the mother had always turned up their noses when she took out the dolls, she said. She looked at me for the first time as if for confirmation that this was okay. I nodded and asked: ‘What was wrong with that?’ She turned away again and answered: ‘My grandmother was convinced that life is a struggle that we must be tough, otherwise we do not survive. They often said to us, “If you knew what I have suffered, you would not play so happy.” ’ For a moment this phrase hung in the air. The question crossed my mind of whether the grandmother had been envious of the joy of the children and whether there existed a connection with the crisis situation in any form. It was a hypothesis. Apart from that I didn’t succeed in establishing an emotional contact with her in the initial consultation. We agreed weekly meetings with the goal of processing the miscarriage and a clarification of the professional and relational perspectives. From then on, the patient came regularly and on time to the sessions. As first diagnostic clues I noted weak self-esteem, a lack of autonomous development, dissociative defences and a depressive processing mode. In Jungian terminology it should be added that her persona – her role and adaption to the outside – was rigid and had now cracked. Her ego strength was only weakly developed, while aggression, creativity and imagination were in the shadow. I also suspected a negative transference because of her internal working models and complex, since she refused contact and was unconsciously afraid that I might react like the grandmother or mother. In the countertransference I realized a slight disinterest in me and a rather unusual wish to look at her problems from a purely
objective perspective. Negative projections on other relevant people were probably also to be found, and that meant she was maintaining her dissociative mechanisms. In the subsequent meetings she spoke about her distant relationship with her father. She had hardly seen him in her childhood as he was often absent. Her relationship with her mother was distant. Her mother held on to the strong grandmother, who had the budget under control. The patient said she had suffered much from her: ‘She constantly criticized me when I was dreaming instead of doing my homework. I made up stories in which I was a princess and that made her very angry’, lamented Sandra. In the following I will focus on the influence and effect of the grandmother on Sandra. This will inevitably neglect other important influences by the parents and especially by the father. The relationship between the grandmother and Sandra was crucial for Sandra’s later development, which is why I now concentrate on this. A fragmentary excerpt from a session shows the following relationship. As usual, Sandra came to the session on time. She looked like always – a little absent – and told me of her fear of the eyes of the grandmother, who looked hard and angry. She told me of her fear of her voice, the screaming nagging – she wastes her time, she should not be dreaming, but do her homework. Sandra said that this screaming unsettled her very much because she always had the feeling that something was wrong with her. She was just paralysed, looking down, waiting for the attacks to finish, but would have liked to fall into the ground, so bad, so useless and worthless she had felt. She did not look at me during the story; her figure was slumped. I could empathize with her panic and paralysis, on the one hand, but at the same time had also the desire to tell her that she should fight back and stand up for herself. I didn’t verbalize this countertransference feeling. There was a crippling, relentless mood in the room; time seemed to stand still. The power of the archetype of the evil witch was for noticeable to us both; this power was now in the room, but not yet named. The client added, after a while: ‘I envied my brothers, who had no problems with her’. Her mother supported the grandmother, not the client:
Bad for me were that she told me in secret, she sees herself in me. She did not say anything further, but today I think my mother was too weak against the fierce grandmother. I am disappointed about her. I would have liked more maternal support for the attacks. In the
world of grandmother, you had to just work, otherwise there was nothing, no feelings, no daydreams, I could not think up spinning stories.
