A Sadomasochistic Transference - Beth J. Seelig, MD

and give up being bad. When she periodically found the courage to assert herself
against mother (or analyst), this assertion took the form of raging tirades, which
were later used as confirmation of her sense of badness. Another mechanism was
critical in locking in her pathological tie to her mother: this was the narcissistic
pleasure Miss T. took in feeling essential to the mother even if only as her phobic
partner. Since she suffered from severe envy of all three siblings, any aspect of her
relationship that gave her pride of first place—whether as mother's victim or
phobic partner—was experienced as essential to her specialness.
As Miss T. recalled it, mother interfered actively with any of her early efforts
to form an attachment either to father or to her siblings, thus thwarting her
attempts to extricate herself. She despaired of father as he was of no help, failing
to intervene and thereby offering no alternative to the pathological motherdaughter
bond. A new memory retrieved in the course of the analysis suggests the
way in which triangulation was thwarted by Miss T.'s mother, a disruption father
allowed. When Miss T. was four years old, her father took her on a rollercoaster.
She sat on his lap and was thrilled by the experience. Upon their return home,
however, when she ran to tell her mother about the exciting ride with Daddy, her
mother went into a rage with her for having allowed her father to do such a
dangerous thing. The affective valence of the experience was shifted 180 degrees:
from pleasurable, erotically tinged excitement, to guilty humiliation-laden
depression and suppressed rage. In this memory, father also failed her; he said
nothing at all in response to his wife's scathing attack on their daughter. To turn to
such a father to "make it up" would indeed be "ridiculous"
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(it was the patient's longing for paternal rescue and her hopelessness at achieving
it that were presaged in her initial dream). Her mother's message, as Miss T.
interpreted it, was that she should be of one mind with her mother and also that
she should not form a separate relationship with her father, as such a relationship
would imperil the life-sustaining mother-daughter bond.
In the analysis, Miss T. expected to be misunderstood, even while
vociferously demanding that her analyst be an "analytic mirror." In essence, she
was demanding that the analyst provide her with that empathic understanding of
which she had felt deprived. When she perceived any failure of empathy on the
part of her analyst, she felt entitled to unleash her intense aggression. However,
when she thought that the analyst did indeed validate her account of events, she
berated her for being so easily duped. The ease of regression and the intensity of
the transference, which at times seemed to overwhelm Miss T.'s small remnant of
observing ego, appeared to be related both to her distorted relationship with her
mother and the resultant instability of the oedipal configuration. This instability
manifested itself in a rapid shift from oedipal issues and object relations to