ANALYSIS OF A DISTURBED ADOLESCENT GIRL AND COLLABORATIVE PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT OF THE MOTHER

In the present paper the authors present an analysis of an extremely disturbed sixteen year old girl and the collaborative psychiatric treatment of her mother. Although still unfinished, the case is presented because it illustrates several points: The daughter, so ill at the beginning of treatment that one feared for her sanity, is now well on the way to recovery, while the mother, previously not considered ill, is now seen to present a complicated psychiatric problem. Because of the psychopathology in the family, the girl’s illness had been attributed to heredity rather than to her life experiences. Treatment revealed the astonishingly distorted, at times gravely annihilatory, but mutually gratifying, attitudes of the mother and daughter toward one another. This, more than the immaturity of the ego and great strength of the instincts in adolescence, makes treatment difficult and dangerous. Study of the case revealed that this girl could only be treated-or even allowed by the parents to remain in treatment-with the aid of the most detailed collaboration between the therapists. This case shows also that intensive or analytic therapy of the disturbed adolescent is highly dangerous, not so much because of the strength of the child‘s instincts and immaturity of ego, as others have stated, but because she may be the channel through which the parent achieves, unconsciously, her own forbidden and thwarted impulses. For this reason seriously disturbed adolescents often cannot be treated without treatment of the significant parent, particularly in so far as the nature of the mutual gratifications binds the child to the home. The search for the parent’s role requires far more than an occasional advisory interview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)