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A body with chronic fatigue syndrome as a battleground for the fight to separate from the mother
Author(s) -
Simpson Michael
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/j.1465-5922.1997.00201.x
Subject(s) - dream , psychoanalysis , drama , parallels , psychology , wife , psychotherapist , literature , art , philosophy , mechanical engineering , theology , engineering
I describe the therapy of a 20‐year‐old woman who believed that her difficulties in concentrating and remembering were caused by her ‘ME’ (Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS). She had been fathered by a man who never left his own wife. Work with her dreams revealed a within‐body drama in which she was locked in an unspeakable fight to the death with her mother. Her symptoms improved after parallels between a dream and an accident showed her own self‐destructive hand in her story. Another dream, reflecting her first ‘incestuous’ affair, showed her search for her original father‐self as someone separate from mother, and a later affair provided a between‐body drama, helping her to own the arrogant and abject traits she had before seen only as her mother's. I show how we worked in the area of Winnicott's first ‘primitive agony’ as experienced by a somatizing patient, stuck in a too‐close destructive relationship with her mother‐body. I discuss how analytical work can be done with the primitive affects and conflicts against which the ME symptoms may be defending.