A Sadomasochistic Transference - Beth J. Seelig, MD

unabated, fueled by their ability to perform well academically with ease and to
chart "appropriate" career goals.
Miss T.'s union with E., which had seemed to be evidence of her ability to
form a mature heterosexual bond, was later shown to be essentially asexual, what
we would call pseudoheterosexual, and beset with anger and mutual
recriminations. In contrast, she had developed a different way of relating to people
with whom she was only moderately close: with such friends, she was always
"good." She had the feeling, however, that the
- 968 -
way she was in relation to these friends was somehow not really authentic.
Initially, her protestations of being "really" a nasty person despite being a good
friend were incompletely understood as the expression of an overly severe
superego in a neurotic patient. Later, we came to understand them as part of a
masochistic and narcissistic defensive structure.
Treatment
Although we are not reporting material from sessions in which the
transference rage was in abeyance, Miss T., the little girl who "when she was good
… was very, very good and when she was bad … was horrid," had many calm
sessions in which she was able to behave as a "very good" patient.
In her first dream, reported during the second couch session, Miss T. arrived
for a session at the wrong time. Finding her analyst with another patient, she was
about to leave, when a male analyst offered to "make it up" with her. She was on
the verge of accepting the offer when it occurred to her that this would be
"ridiculous," and she left. She then found herself in an elevator with a woman who
was laughing at her for being stupid, and she became furious. When asked to
associate to the idea of having a male analyst offer to "make it up," she said she
had felt disappointed that she had been referred to a female analyst, because she
felt that women really could not do work as good as that of men. She thought,
however, that having a woman analyst might help her overcome feelings of
inferiority associated with her femaleness.
In retrospect, Miss T.'s initial dream presaged the trajectory of the
transference. She wished to be able to turn to a third person (the male analyst of
the dream, or her father) to help her to extricate herself from her hostile-dependent
tie to her mother and to feel better (be less burdened by the image of herself as the
bad little girl), but in the dream, as later in the transference, she could not allow
herself to accept what was offered. The offer was "ridiculous." Feeling derision
toward
- 969 -