Psychotherapeutic Work with a Ten‐Year‐Old Girl: with particular reference to the development of her introjective potential

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to illustrate with clinical material certain basic concepts which emerged in working psychotherapeutically with a ten‐year‐old girl. These concepts ‐ with particular reference to Klein, Bick and Meltzer ‐ are lack of containment and secondary skin function; adhesive identification and two‐dimensionality; projective identification and inner space. Work began with the patient inaccessibly in a two‐dimensional state eliciting a frequent counter‐transference response of extreme sleepiness. Then at the point at which the therapist was assailed by very powerful physical and emotional sensations in the countertransference, a shift occurred whereby the patient began to use the therapist as an object that could contain some of these projections. A powerful interchange was then under way wherein the patient, with the experience of someone capable of staying with her, developed an awareness of her inner space which could be filled by introjection, as well as that of the therapist which could receive her projections.