4. Drive Destiny

 

The case of Mary: an obsessional neurosis

"I'm always afraid my son will get a cold and a cough"

 

Pushed by her husband who threatens to divorce, Marie, a young woman in her forties, decides to undertake a psychoanalysis to get rid of the obsession that is ruining her life and that of the family. The following case study will show that Marie's obsession speaks of a subconscious conflict between her Id, Ego and Superego who refuses to allow any expression of her true desires as it has judged it to be morally wrong.

During our first interview, Marie goes through extensive detail about how she feels. She explains that she is always afraid that something will happen to her son but more specifically, she fears that he catches a cold and a bad cough. This constant fear drives her to make extra effort to avoid her son from getting cold. For instance, every morning, she will check the outside temperature as soon as she gets up then checks it again several times to make sure she was not mistaken. Then she will look at the weather forecast for the upcoming days to see how to adapt accordingly. She then will make her son take an extra sweater in his school bag in case there should be a temperature drop. The boy knows that if he feels the slightest cold, he is to put on the sweater and immediately phone his mother. When he is home, she constantly asks him if he's cold or if he feels a draft coming from an open window. At night she wakes up several times to listen to his breathing, to make sure that he isn't coughing and to pull the covers up over him. Even when the family is in their summer home in the mountains and that the weather is warm, she is still worried to the point where she cannot relax as the thought of changing temperature during the day or night and inside or outside obsesses her. She forces her son to put on a sweater when he comes in the house and though her husband keeps telling her that she is crazy and shows her the thermometer which shows 25 degrees Celsius, she still cannot reason herself. One summer, when her son had caught a cold and was coughing, she was so worried that she made him a fur lining to put under his shirt. During this session, I learn that her son is 10 years old and that she also has a 12 year old daughter. Her husband is a computer engineer and is often absent because of his work. Marie stays home to care for the children and home. Her own father was a pharmacist and her mother a chemist. She grew up in a traditional family and has one older brother, the age difference being of 8 years.

The first sessions all revolve around the concerns she has for her son but she later begins to recall her childhood during which there was a period when she wished to be a boy like her brother because she found him to be strong and handsome but also because she envied his position in the family. It seems that their mother would always make excuses for him and all the silly things he would do and he was also privileged because he never had to partake in any household chores. As for their father, he implicitly deemed his son to be the smarter one as he was very good in math and always had very good grades which was not her case. Marie was more of a dreamer who liked reading. She found some sort of compensation for the lack of love that she felt throughout the stories in her books. She loved her brother a lot and wanted him to take an interest in her, but he made fun of her and pushed her away most of the time when she wanted to play with him though she does recall that she was very happy the few times he did play with her and give her some attention. This reminds her of a dream she had a while ago: strolling in a park, walking with her brother, holding hands. There were merry go rounds and other rides like a boat on an enchanted river, then they were on a carousel, the wooden horse turning quickly, eating cotton candy. She speaks abundantly about this dream that is based on a real event that she remembers fondly as she describes the feeling of his hand in hers.

In a later session, she tells me about her son and his behaviour. She describes him as kind and obedient; he is careful not to catch a cold; he always asks how he should dress. She focuses on his health problems to explain why he does not have many friends, is fearful and also why his grades are erratic. When her son is sick or when he gets bad grades, her husband says that she becomes quite motherly and supportive of the child but that when he is well or gets good grades, she becomes angry and begins to nag him. Her husband accuses her of being unfair to her son and of not realizing it. After a few moments of silence, she tells me about a phone call from her mother the day before to tell her that her brother will undergo light surgery. New silence, then she tells me that she had a strange dream. She dreamed of her brother, and that he had disappeared. Her mother and her went looking for him and then took a taxi home where there was no longer his professional plaque on the door… strangers were whispering unintelligible sentences. This is when she woke up feeling very worried and could no longer go back to sleep.

At a later session, Marie talks to me about a cat she has seen on her way in and just as she was settling in on the couch, she started to wonder if the cat had been "cut". Her ideas then turn to abandoned cats in the village where she goes on vacation. She believes in castrating all these animals to prevent their proliferation, she also tells me about her neighbour's trees that climb to the sky and block the view. She has asked him to cut them down but he refuses. She is also worried about the grass in front of the house that she cannot stand to see grow, her husband has to mow it regularly to keep her from getting upset. She adds that her friends tell her that she is often talking about cutting things or castrating animals. She admits that she hates everything that stands out, she claims that it bothers her view and that it is messy. One day, her husband and her son had planted a tree near the house that grew too quickly to her liking. She watched the tree grow day by day until she decided to secretly kill it.

In another session she tells me that she often dreams of war and begins to describe the dream from the night before : it's war time and there are soldiers everywhere. She takes refuge with her parents and her brother in the cellar where there are pipes that form a kind of tunnel through which they can escape. They arrive at a field but mines are scattered on the ground that turn into carrots that they can eat. They find themselves watching a parade of soldiers that her brother is participating in and she wonders why he is there.

In the next session, she tells me that she has dreamed of war again: her brother is sent on a foreign mission and just as war breaks out, the world is divided into two. She is on a boat, she can either get herself to safety on an island or go to war and look for her brother. She chooses the latter but the boat's captain refuses to search for him. There is a feeling of tension and mistrust as the declaration of war was to have been kept secret, no one but her and her brother should have known about it.

A few weeks later, Marie tells me another dream: she discovers that she is a witch, she had the power to transform people by touching them. She was afraid of touching her son, fearing he would change into an animal and she was also afraid of touching her brother because then everyone would find out that she was a witch. When she awoke from this dream, she couldn't shake the feeling that she shouldn't touch her son which reminds her that when he was a baby, she was afraid of holding him because she thought that she might hurt him if she wasn't careful enough. He often had eczema, he had a small appetite and often rejected the food she would feed him. He then developed a chronic cough around 2 years of age which worried her greatly.

In a later session, arriving in a terrible mood, she laid silently for a long time which seemed to be a hostile silence. I tell her that she looks unhappy to which she replies that she is very angry at me. She says that I don't want to give her anything, that she knows that I don't like her. She hates me because when she asks for help, I don't give it to her, that she resents me for not being able to make her feel better and says that it's because I don't like her and that I don't care about her. She then adds: “I needed a hand that I could have squeezed in mine but there is nothing.” To which I answer : “A hand like your brother's in the garden?” She then bursts into tears and whispers, “Yes, that's what I always wanted ... if you only knew all that he did to me, that bastard”. After a long moment of tears, she expresses all the accumulated grievances and the hatred she feels towards him who not only rejected her but when he would give her some attention it would always be with contempt and mockery.