ANIMAL KILLER

ANIMAL KILLER
Transmission of War Trauma from One
Generation to the Next
Vamık D. Volkan
First published 2014 by Karnac Books Ltd.
Published 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 ird Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2014 by Vamık D. Volkan

e right of Vamık D. Volkan to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, meanical, or other means, now known or
hereaer invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 9781782200734 (pbk)
Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THIS BOOK

FOREWORD

A second look
M. Gerard Fromm

CHAPTER ONE

My behind-the-scenes work with Peter

CHAPTER TWO

What makes a person live in an “island empire”?

CHAPTER THREE

Gregory’s birdhouse and Peter’s raccoon experience

CHAPTER FOUR

Bla bears and taxidermy

CHAPTER FIVE

“Empty sleep”, therapeutic regression, and “crucial juncture”

experiences
CHAPTER SIX

Operation Desert Storm, sinking a psyological submarine,

and the inability to shoot a bla bear
CHAPTER SEVEN

Mourning and oedipal issues

CHAPTER EIGHT

A “second look”, freeing a bird, and the end of psyoanalytic

work
REFERENCES

INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vamık Volkan is an Emeritus Professor of Psyiatry at the
University of Virginia, Charloesville, Virginia; the Senior Erik
Erikson Solar at the Erikson Institute for Education and
Resear of the Austen Riggs Center, Stobridge,
Massauses; and an Emeritus Training and Supervising
Analyst at the Washington Psyoanalytic Institute,
Washington, DC. He served as the Medical Director of the
University of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital and as director of
the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Mind and
Human Interaction (CSMHI). He holds Honorary Doctorate
degrees from the University of Kuopio Finland and from
Ankara University, Turkey. He is a former President of the
Turkish-American Neuropsyiatric Society, the International
Society of Political Psyology (ISPP), the Virginia
Psyoanalytic Society, and the American College of
Psyoanalysts. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor
of dozens of books, and the author of hundreds of book
apters and academic papers. He has served on the editorial
boards of sixteen professional journals including the Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Over past decades, Professor Volkan has been the Inaugural

Yitzhak Rabin Fellow, e Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israeli
Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel; a Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massauses; a Visiting Professor of
Political Science, the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria;
and a Visiting Professor of Political Psyology, Bahçeşehir
University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has also served as a Visiting
Professor of Psyiatry at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey;
Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey; and Cerrahpaş a Medical
Faculty, Istanbul, Turkey.
Professor Volkan served as a member of the Carter Center’s
International Negotiation Network, headed by former president
Jimmy Carter. He aired the Select Advisory Commission to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Critical Incident Response
Group, was a Temporary Consultant to the World Health
Organization (WHO) in Albania and Macedonia, and a
Fulbright Solar in Austria. He has received numerous awards
from national and international organisations, including the
Elise M. Hayman Award given by the American
Orthopsyiatric Association for his contributions to the
psyology of racism and genocide, and the Sigmund Freud
Award given by the city of Vienna in collaboration with the
World Council for Psyotherapy.
Currently Dr. Volkan (with Lord John Alderdice (United
Kingdom) and Dr. Robi Friedman (Israel)) airs the
International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) meetings. He established
the IDI in 2007, with the Austen Riggs Center in Stobridge,
Massauses as its administrative home. e IDI members are
unofficial representatives from Lebanon, Iran, Israel, Germany,
Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
West Bank. ey meet twice a year to examine world affairs
primarily from a psyopolitical point of view.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Ten hours aer the raid on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941,
200 Japanese bombers arrived in the Philippines over Manila
and found the American warplanes still on the runways—like
siing dus. e Japanese pilots destroyed everything they
saw. is was a portent of more horrible things to come,
including events in the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula.
Soon aer the aa on the American military airport the
Imperial Japanese Army began invading the Philippines.
General Douglas MacArthur, then commander of US Army
Forces Far East stationed in Manila, was compelled to
withdraw his troops; an estimated 60,000 Filipinos and 15,000
Americans withdrew to the Bataan Peninsula, where they
waited for relief. e situation there became so bad that the
soldiers began anting the limeri wrien by Frank West
Hewle, who was a war correspondent during World War II.
We’re the Baling Bastards of Bataan,
No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn!
General MacArthur, his family and staff managed to escape
from the Peninsula in Mar 1942, leaving the American
soldiers feeling abandoned. Aer a 90-day siege, on 9 April
1942, the Americans and Filipinos surrendered to the Japanese.
e prisoners of war, an estimated 75,000 of them, were forced
to walk fiy-five miles in the broiling sun while Japanese beat
them with rifle bus and whips, killing some of them. e
captives were given no food during the first three days of
walking and were forced to drink water from filthy wallows
used by water buffalos. It is estimated that between 100 and
650 American and between 2,500 and 10,000 Filipino prisoners
of war died during this horrifying mar, whi would be
recorded in history as the Bataan Death Mar. e death
marers arrived at San Fernando where they were piled into
boxcars and then taken by rail to Capas. From there they were
forced to walk another eight miles to Camp O’Donnell, whi
was originally a Philippine Army post that had become a
facility of the United States Air Force.
Many first-hand stories have been wrien about the horrors
the prisoners of war experienced at Camp O’Donnell
(Hartendorp, 1967; Dyess, 2002; Knox, 2002; Boyt & Bur,
2004. See also: Report on American Prisoners of War Interned
by the Japanese in the Philippines, Prepared by the Office of the
Provost Marshal General 19 November 1945). An estimated
40,000 Philippine and American prisoners would die at this
camp due to its horribly unsanitary conditions, malnutrition,
dysentery, and mosquito-transmied dengue fever and cerebral
malaria. Many prisoners walked around with open, untreated
wounds. During this time, it is said that the Japanese Army
provided food and medical care for its own people. Besides
being obliged to bow to Japanese officers, boil the dirty water
before drinking it and constantly shoo away flies, the prisoners
endured terrible treatment. Some of them were beheaded next
to open graves and others had to rebury corpses that heavy
rains and floods had brought to the surface. General
MacArthur returned to the Philippines in late 1944 as he had
promised, and eventually the US Army and the Philippine
Commonwealth Army liberated Camp O’Donnell on 30
January 1945.
One of the Americans who survived the Bataan Death
Mar and endured Camp O’Donnell was a large, handsome
young man. He was at the camp for about a year and, just
before conditions there began to improve slightly, he was sent
to another prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines. At the new
location he continued to experience horrors similar to those he
had endured at Camp O’Donnell. By the time he was saved, he
had lost over sixty-five pounds. Let us call him Gregory.
Gregory came from a well-to-do family. Before he had been
sent overseas—soon aer he began studying engineering—he
had known a girl from a poor baground named Libby, who
had gone to his high sool. Aer Gregory returned to his
hometown in Virginia, weak and bewildered, he again met this
young woman who had not gone to college and was working
at a local drugstore. While Gregory was away Libby had
married a man aer geing pregnant. Her husband le her
when their son was only six weeks old and later they were
divorced. We will call her lile boy Peter.
When Gregory appeared in lile Peter’s life the boy was
three years old, living with his mother and maternal
grandmother in a small apartment. His biological father was
still in the same town but had no connection with his ex-wife
or his ild and, for reasons unknown to me, did not pay ild
support. Peter’s maternal grandfather was long dead. His
grandmother was involved with a rather fundamentalist
Baptist ur whi provided the sole social life for her and
her daughter. In spite of their smiles at the ur and
expressions of love for humankind, both women were
frustrated, angry, and most likely depressed. ey felt
overburdened by lile Peter, and in their resentment they
overfed him, intruding on the boy’s autonomy by spoon-
feeding him, even aer he had learnt how to use eating
utensils. He became an overweight ild. Peter did not have his
own bed and slept with his grandmother.
Gregory, who was having a hard time adjusting to post-
prisoner-of-war life, took refuge in this apartment to escape the
routine outside world of his former friends, family members,
and their circle of friends. Since he did not work, he spent most
of his time in this apartment as if in a prison. He became
Libby’s lover. Peter’s grandmother moved to an apartment next
door and remained the boy’s primary caregiver while Libby
continued to work at the drugstore. In the evening Peter would
stay at the grandmother’s apartment and continue to sleep
with her. When Peter began sool, the two intrusive women
did his homework for him, forced him to listen to Bible stories,
and to be an obedient, “good” boy.
 Sensing that Peter had been raised as if he were imprisoned
by two frustrated and angry women, Gregory unconsciously
saw a “fit” between the lile boy’s developing self-
representation and his own helpless self-image that he had
developed in the Philippines. He found a tool “out there” in
Peter’s developing internal structure that would absorb his
incredibly traumatised self-image. Gregory “deposited” his own
traumatised self-image in the lile boy’s evolving self-
representation.
Memories belonging to one person cannot be transmied to
another person. However, an adult may “deposit” his own
injured self-images within a ild along with images of others
who were involved in the traumatic event—even sometimes the
image of the perpetrator. e adult then adds psyological
tasks to these transferred images that aim to ease the pain and
terror of the original trauma, or control the outcome of the
trauma. Depositing is closely related to “identification” in
ildhood, but it is in some ways significantly different. In
identification, the ild is the primary active partner in taking
in and assimilating an adult’s images, and owning this person’s
ego and superego functions. In depositing, the adult person
more actively plants his specific images into the developing
self-representation of the ild. In other words, the adult
person uses the ild (mostly unconsciously) as a permanent
reservoir for certain self- and other images belonging to
himself. e experiences that created these mental images in
the adult are not accessible to the ild. Yet, those mental
images are pushed into the ild, without the
experiential/contextual framework that created them.
e well-known phenomenon of the “replacement ild”
illustrates depositing (Cain & Cain, 1964; Legg & Sheri, 1976;
Poznanski, 1972; Ainslie & Solyom, 1986). A ild dies; soon
aer, the mother becomes pregnant again, and the second ild
lives. e mother “deposits” her image of the dead ild—
including her affective relationship with the dead ild—into
the developing identity of her second ild. e second ild
now has the task of keeping this “deposited” identity within
himself. ere are different ways for the ild to respond to
this mission (Volkan & Ast, 1997).
Judith Kestenberg’s term (1982) “transgenerational
transposition”, Haydée Faimberg’s (2005) description of “the
telescoping of generations”, and Anne Ancelin
Sützenberger’s (1998) “ancestor syndrome” refer to
depositing traumatised images. Depositing is related to a well-
known concept in individual psyology called “projective
identification” (Klein, 1946). When depositing occurs during
ildhood and deposited images sele in the ild’s developing
self-representations it functions like a “psyological DNA”
whi will influence the ild’s behaviour paerns when the
ild grows up.
Peter’s traumatised developing self-representation became
intertwined with Gregory’s traumatised self-image. is way,
Gregory could escape, psyologically speaking, carrying his
own traumatised self-image within. As years passed, Gregory
slowly began giving Peter tasks to deal with his
overdependence on two women and his extreme helplessness,
hopelessness, humiliation, and ineffective rage. In turn, the
growing boy did what needed to be done to ange Gregory’s
traumatised deposited image that was entwined with his own
images—without being aware of it, of course. is helped
Gregory begin to “recover.” He married Peter’s mother.
Because Gregory had family money the couple and
prepubescent Peter were able to move into a big, new house
with a garden. e grandmother was le behind. Gregory was
also a Baptist, but not mu involved in religion. Libby
withdrew from her previous intense involvement with the
fundamentalist ur and stood by Gregory as he adjusted to
a “normal” life. is included renewing contacts with old
family friends who had connections to politics and business,
and in time he was able to develop his own extremely
prosperous enterprise. But everything was not pleasant for
Gregory and his family. Gregory’s ri family members did not
feel close to Libby, who they thought of as uneducated and
unsophisticated. Meanwhile she, newly ri, distanced herself
from her previous poor friends. Socially, the three of them led a
rather isolated life. Very distant eoes of the prison-camp
remained present in Gregory’s world.
In order to maintain his adjustment to “normal” life, in
Peter’s early teen years Gregory began urging him to hunt.
Aer a dramatic event during his adolescence, whi I will
describe later, Peter was no longer overweight. Not
succumbing to helplessness and hiding his old dependency on
intrusive women—to be the hunter instead of the hunted—were
crucial for Peter’s psyological survival and, since he
remained a substitute for traumatised Gregory, for the older
man too. It was beer to be a powerful aggressor in control of
guns than to be a target of others’ aggression.
Peter grew up and graduated from a military academy. His
grandmother had died while he was at the academy. As an
adult, first in the military and later as a civilian, Peter
developed a reputation as a hunter, but not as a sportsman. He
became a “killer” of animals. He would collect what I call
“aggressive triumphs” (Volkan, 2010) lest he should lose his
self-esteem and feel empty. Aer serving as a helicopter pilot
in the Vietnam War, he became an important person in the
American war industry, preoccupied with modern weapons,
and made a great deal of money. He also got to know many
high-level politicians and important business people. He felt
omnipotent and was exaggeratedly narcissistic. But there was
another side to Peter. He was a heavy drinker and aer his
marriage—whi took place in the United States during leave
while he was still serving in Vietnam—he also suffered from
bulimia. He would overeat, but controlled his body weight by
having “trained” his abdominal muscles to allow him to vomit
at will. At times he gorged and threw up more than once a day.
His addiction to alcohol and overeating served the memories of
his ildhood dependency on his mother and grandmother who
overfed him, but he was in control of his own body weight and
would not allow himself to become a “fat man”.
Simultaneously, the Gregory “in him” would not face the
malnutrition of the Japanese prison camps that had made him
emancipated and weak, hence the bulimia.
is book describes Peter’s internal world where
traumatised Gregory also “resided”. In reality I never met Peter
or Gregory and do not know their real names. Peter was in his
mid-forties when he sought psyological treatment and
Gregory was in his late sixties. Now, over two and a half
decades later as I write this book, I do not know if they are still
alive. I was the supervisor of Peter’s psyoanalyst with whom
I met once a week—except during my vacations—for five years
and advised him in his work with Peter. Peter never knew that
I existed and played a role in his life. In turn, I never had the
urge to find out who he is—or was.
I had a custom of keeping copious notes while supervising
colleagues’ work. Since Peter was not my patient, obviously
there are areas of his life about whi I have no information. If
I were informed about these areas they were not recorded, and
I have forgoen them aer so many years. I also lost contact
with his psyoanalyst over two decades ago. Reading my
notes, however, allows me to describe sufficiently Peter’s
internal world and anges within it during his treatment.
In 1993 I provided a summary of Peter’s case in German
(Volkan & Ast, 1994). Brief references to Peter’s case can also
be found in my other writings (Volkan, 2006, 2010). e reader
may wonder what motivated me to write about Peter now.
What are my aims?
My primary motivation for writing about Peter’s internal
world and anges that took place in it while he underwent
psyoanalysis has come from my friend Dr. Gerard Fromm.
During the winter of 2013 Dr. Fromm was still the director of
the Erikson Institute of Education and Resear of the Austen
Riggs Center in Stobridge, Massauses. Every year since
2003 I have spent winter months at the Erikson Institute as the
Senior Erikson Solar. On the morning of 14 December 2012,
just as I was preparing for my annual visit to the Austen Riggs
Center, an unbelievably horrible tragedy took place in
Newtown, Connecticut not so far away from Stobridge. A
gunman aaed Sandy Hook Elementary Sool killing
twenty ildren between the ages of six and seven, and six
adults. is tragedy brought about intense discussions in the
media, academic circles, and homes all over the United States,
asking what kind of a person could carry out su an act,
revisiting memories of previous mass shootings of innocent
people, wondering how to help mourners, and reviving debates
on gun control issues. Dr. Fromm asked if I would give a series
of seminars at the Austen Riggs Center on mourning, and its
contamination with trauma and related topics, whi included
wondering about what kind of a person deliberately shoots to
kill people in sools or shopping centres, as well as the
transgenerational transmissions of consequences of drastic
losses and trauma (Kogan, 1995; Kestenberg & Brenner, 1996;
Laub & Podell, 1997; Brenner, 2001, 2004). Not long ago Dr.
Fromm edited a book on transgenerational transmissions
(Fromm, 2011), and I, with Gabriele Ast and William Greer,
wrote a book on the same topic (Volkan, Ast, & Greer, 2002).
Discussions with Dr. Fromm led me to begin writing this book.
Peter, excepting the time when he served in the Vietnam
War, had not killed people. In his civil life he was only a “mass
killer” of animals. I thought that a look at his internal world
might give us a glimpse into what kinds of psyological
motivations can direct a person to have the impulse—one
might say, “need”—to use weapons for mass killings. I must add
right away that all mass-killers of innocent ildren and adults
must have their own psyological makeup. Since I never
studied any su person I cannot say if some of them share
specific psyological motivations. As stated above, Peter’s case
only refers to his motivations for dramatic murderous
aggressive acts against animals and only directs us to think of
similar or related, but specific in their own right, motivations
for someone becoming a mass murderer of people.
As an adult Peter exhibited exaggerated grandiosity. In this
book I will describe internal worlds of persons who exhibit
similar personality aracteristics. ey are known as persons
who have narcissistic personality organissation. ey strive to
be “number one” in power, brilliance, wealth, and beauty. ey
are overtly grandiose, self-absorbed, and feel entitled to what
they consider the best things a human being can have. ey
may appear ambitious, opinionated, articulate, seductive, and
even arismatic. Many su aracteristics were readily
observable in Peter. Closer examination also shows that self-
esteem is fragile in su individuals, and they experience
feelings of dependency, inferiority, envy, rage, paranoid
ideation, and a need to collect adoration. ey keep their
collected grandiose images separated from, not integrated with,
collections of their devalued images. Peter confirmed his
grandiosity by exhibiting power and cruelty—in his case
against animals. He had a malignant narcissistic personality
organisation, confirming his vision of himself as “number one”
because he wielded power and cruelty. One aim of this book is
to illustrate some tenical issues in psyoanalysing a person
with malignant narcissistic personality organisation.
Narcissism is linked to self-preservation and in human
functioning it is as normal as sex, aggression, and anxiety
(Rangell, 1980). As su, it is subject to variations. It can be
“healthy” or “unhealthy”. A ild with a healthy narcissism, in
growing independent, loves herself not only when feeling
loved by the members of the family, but also when rejected by
others (Weigert, 1967). As an adult this person is capable of
maintaining self-esteem when facing losses or traumas. A
concentrated effort in American psyoanalytic circles to study
individuals with unhealthy, exaggerated narcissism, especially
by Heinz Kohut and Oo Kernberg, took place in the 1960s and
1970s. Kohut posited an independent line of development from
autoeroticism through narcissism whi is adaptive and
culturally valuable. Maternal shortcomings lead to a fixation in
the ild and the ild develops a grandiose and exhibitionistic
self-image that Kohut called the “grandiose self”. If the
maternal shortcomings have not been too great, the grandiose
self is transformed into a self with mature ambitions and self-
esteem (Kohut, 1966, 1971, 1977). While Kohut was developing
his metapsyological understanding of narcissism following
Edith Jacobson (1964), Kernberg (1975, 1976, 1980) focused on
object relations conflict when he described persons who have
narcissistic personality organisation. In su individuals, he
illustrated, the libidinal investment is not directed towards a
normally integrated self-structure; su individuals possess an
unintegrated self-structure. Object relations conflict refers to
tensions concerning integrating or not integrating libidinally
and aggressively loaded self- and object images within, or
externalising them onto others and re-internalising them.
Kernberg also used the term “grandiose self” in describing the
libidinally loaded, omnipotent part of the self that su patients
usually exhibit overtly. ey keep their devalued aspects
covert. While persons with malignant personality organisation
share the aracteristics of the typical person with narcissistic
personality organisation, they regularly do something else:
they are excessively sadistic in the service of maintaining and
protecting their grandiose selves. Masoism coexists in them,
but the clinical picture reflects the expression of excessive
sadism while masoism remains covert. In this book I will
illustrate how Peter had, when he began his treatment, an
unintegrated internal world. But I will also focus on how
maternal shortcomings played a role in the development of his
malignant narcissistic personality organisation.
In Peter’s case, the evolution of malignant narcissistic
personality organisation and the intergenerational transmission
of a mental image were intertwined because he was also given
aggressive, sadistic tasks to maintain and protect the deposited
image. Other aims of this book are to provide detailed clinical
illustrations of transgenerational transmission of trauma, its
dramatic consequences in the life of a person in the next
generation, and how, during treatment of su individuals, it
creates obstacles to their recovery.
In 2010 Nancy Sherman published a book describing the
untold war in the hearts, minds, and souls of soldiers who have
fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the guilt and trauma
they carried, losses they experienced, and struggles they
endured when returning to civilian life. As I begin writing this
book the media reports a US military suicide epidemic, and we
have been informed that in 2012 more soldiers died from
suicide than on the balefield. When severe losses and traumas
are experienced during wars or war-like situations, oen their
psyological impact continues when the military men and
women return to civilian life. Sometimes these returning
soldiers handle the continuing impact of trauma in creative
ways, sometimes with suicide and sometimes by transferring
the burden to others.
Peter’s case illustrates a vivid example of an older
traumatised person’s psyological image as it is transmied
from one generation to the next and the psyological tasks
required in dealing with su a situation. We learn how a ild,
without being aware of it, was obliged to try to erase the
impact of an incredible trauma an older person had gone
through. Untold wars are not only present in the soldiers
themselves; even aer they leave the balegrounds behind,
su wars are kept alive in the next generation and oen in
those that follow.
ere is one more aim of this book. Since I began teaing
psyoanalysis in the 1970s I have believed that one of the best
ways to tea psyoanalytic tenique and illustrate different
phases of su a treatment is for senior psyoanalyst
educators to provide detailed accounts of cases from the
beginnings of the treatments until their conclusions. In this
way, colleagues and younger students of psyoanalysis can
compare their own experiences and tenical moves with those
described in papers or books. is opens opportunities for
educational discussions, comparisons, and for learning about
therapeutic teniques.
Since Sigmund Freud’s times there have always been
different psyoanalytic sools. But now, in an era Leo
Rangell (2002) called “growth of pluralism”, we face too many
of them and notice that competition between them oen
becomes struggles within psyoanalytic institutes. erefore,
authoritative presentations of treatment from beginning to end,
from different sools, are necessary to openly and clearly
illustrate the outcome of the applications of different
understandings of psyoanalytic concepts and, especially,
psyoanalytic teniques. As far as I know, only Arnold
Cooper made a serious effort to collect and publish
authoritative presentations of leading psyoanalysts’ views
representing the so-called “new” sools, as well as impressions
expressed by their critics (Cooper, 2006). (Also see Rangell, 2007
& Boesky, 2008.)
What are the aims of different teniques? What does ea
try to ange in the internal structure of an analysand? Do we
need to learn a great deal about our analysands’ ildhood
experiences in order to understand how they relate to their
analysts here and now? Is there a need to focus on dreams?
Should we use dreams as a crucial source in moving the
psyoanalytic process forward? How do different sools
approa individuals with different levels of personality
organisations? ese are crucial questions.
I believe that I have done my share in providing stories of
total psyoanalytic processes (Volkan, 1976, 1984, 1987, 2010;
Volkan & Fowler, 2009), but one more example will be most
useful and this one also illustrates issues in supervision.
Christopher Bollas and David Sundelson (1995) deal with the
important issue of confidentiality when presenting
psyoanalytic case reports. ey state that psyotherapy
without confidentiality is impossible. On the other hand,
without presenting detailed case reports and especially
psyoanalytic processes from their beginning to their
termination, we lose the most effective way to illustrate how
psyoanalysis works—a most important tool for teaing. Of
course, every step needs to be taken to protect the identity of
our patients without anging the psyodynamic data under
observation.
In this book too, I will follow this principle.
FOREWORD

A second look
M. Gerard Fromm

“What are we treating?” Since 2003, the eminent psyoanalyst

Vamık Volkan has served as the Senior Erikson Solar at the
Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. In that role, he
has spent the winter months with us: teaing, consulting with
staff about tenical issues, aending clinical case conferences,
and—inevitably—writing his latest book. His comments at case
conferences—so personally understanding of the patient and so
full of guidance for the therapist—almost always begin with:
“We must ask ourselves: What are we treating?”
Riggs has a nearly seventy-year history of offering intensive
psyoanalytic psyotherapy to very troubled patients in a
completely open therapeutic community seing. In its early
years, it broke theoretical and clinical ground in the evolution
of American ego psyology, through the work of Robert
Knight, Erik Erikson, David Rapaport, and others. Following
that were major contributions to the understanding and
treatment of psyosis under the Medical Directorship of Oo
Will. In recent decades, the staff has brought a variety of
theoretical points of view into dialogue with one another;
modern ego psyological, neo-Kleinian, Winnicoian,
Kohutian, Lacanian, and relational perspectives intermingle—
generally cosily, sometimes fractiously—in an atmosphere of
clinical inquiry.
As I wrote elsewhere (Fromm, 2012a):
[w]hat holds this conceptual diversity together, and
indeed allows for thriving cross-fertilization, is its being
completely grounded in clinical data. e twice-weekly,
two-hour, in-depth case conferences, whi so oen
report the entrened difficulties, genuine traumas and
profound suffering of patients, their families and even
 their therapists, are nevertheless also exhilarating
experiences of learning from the clinical encounter.
And we are all in it together; all of us on the staff treat
patients, all of us struggle and all of us learn from ea
other and from our patients. (p. xii)
And, for some time now, Dr. Volkan has also been in it with us.
Given the pluralism at Riggs, the question, “What are we
treating?” can take people aba, feel disconcerting, even off in
some hard-to-articulate way. Isn’t the question, “Who are we
treating?” with that “who” meant to recognise the person-as-
subject, no maer how embaled, but also to open up the
variations of the “who” question put into play so brilliantly by
Paula Heimann, as summarized by Bollas (1987, p. 1). And
certainly the “What are we treating?” question can rightly
startle us into repudiating the objectification in that crude
word what—an objectification most powerfully—if, from a
developmental perspective, rather uselessly—codified in the
DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
process.
But this book is, among other things, a testament to that
focused first question, “What are we treating?” Dr. Volkan, in
simple, lucid prose, brings us the story of a man whose life
circumstances, unbearable feelings, and protective defences
have organised themselves into a constellation called
“pathological narcissism”, at the heart of whi, in this case, is
the defensive structure of the “grandiose self”, malevolently
using violence to avoid, disarge, and sometimes externalise
and destroy an inner—and ancient—sense of fear, rage, and
profound weakness. Dr. Volkan notes that he was moved to
write this book by the horrific violence in Newtown,
Connecticut, and indeed this story may have its lessons for the
understanding and treatment of those deeply troubled people
whose failing inner resources lead to the mobilisation of
grandiose destructiveness in a last gasp at pseudo-potency.
Orienting ourselves as psyoanalytic therapists to what we
are treating helps us centre on the particular developmental
tragedy the patient is trying to cope with, the nature of the
primitive anxieties associated with those painful ildhood
events, the defences the patient has built to manage them, the
regressive danger the patient fears falling into, and the
developmental place the patient is “reaing up” to, however
aotically and ill-preparedly. And, in turn, this formulation of
the trouble helps us hold an informed therapeutic stance and
guides potentially useful interventions. e what we are
treating perspective helps us with those essential tasks
Winnico articulated so many years ago in his classic paper,
“Hate in the countertransference” (1947): to study, on behalf of
the larger field, “the primitive stages of the emotional
development of the ill individual” and “the nature of the
emotional burden whi the psyiatrist bears in doing his
work” (pp. 19–195).
Understanding what we are treating also helps us think
about how we are to treat, including how our “emotional
burden” is actually part of that treatment. In this particular
story, Dr. Volkan’s great additional contribution is to get us
ba to the question my Riggs colleagues would sometimes like
to begin with: Who are we treating? e answer in this story is
profound: we are treating a person whose use of violence as a
defence, and as a marker of identity, derives from violent
trauma in the life of the man who raised him. In other words—
as the closing of this story poignantly illustrates in the vignee
of the laer’s breakdown—we are treating the
intergenerational transmission of trauma (Fromm, 2012b),
most directly in the person carrying its legacy but also in the
person who, in a sense, “deposited” it into the stepson he loved
in the first place.
e Bataan Death Mar, the Vietnam War, the military-
industrial complex—what Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) call
the “Big History”—are crucial contexts for this story of violence
but also of love. Dr. Volkan illustrates how the analyst’s
sustained, intimate aention opens up the links between this
Big History and the Lile History of a person’s life and its
objects: a statue of Saint Joseph mounted on a model
submarine, an elaborate purple martin birdhouse. And he also
illustrates so clearly how these histories intersect with and play
themselves out in the transference and countertransference
relationship with the analyst. Along the way, we notice
concepts original to Dr. Volkan’s work, for example, traumatic
images from one generation that become “deposited
representations” (Volkan et al., 2002) in the next, or the idea of
a “wartime superego”, under the shaky protection of whi
violence—indeed violence derived from ildhood conflicts—
can be perpetrated in war without devastating depressive
collapse.
Perhaps most of all, what Dr. Volkan gives us in this slender
volume is a detailed account of—and a deep sense of the
human drama of—a full psyoanalytic treatment. It is
astonishing to realise that su a profoundly troubled and
violently defended man can allow himself, with the analyst’s
help, to relax on the cou, and to begin to pay aention to his
devalued, but actually terrifying inner life. And it is very
satisfying that the story of his analysis is told so clearly and
honestly. is book reads like a novel. It moves from story to
story, one emerging—in ways we intuitively understand—from
the other, as the analysis deepens. Oen, we can see how the
analyst’s specific thought-through interventions were pivotal
in subtle, but unmistakable turns in the process. Called to our
aention are the apparently small markers of ange—the first
free association, the first dream. Sequences are highlighted that
make sense, including how unexpected life events, for example,
a mother’s sudden illness, precipitate a regressive reaction. e
patient’s ange is palpable and gratifying.
ere’s a line from a song by the Irish ro band U2 about
things “that have to be believed to be seen”. is is an idea we
come upon again and again in the history of science; ironically,
it is also an idea about faith. In reading this story, we witness
an intimate exercise of faith—the analyst’s faith in the process,
supported, to be sure, by small but compelling evidences that
the process is taking. We notice our gathering sense of
conviction, even if we don’t fully understand every twist and
turn, and can’t fully fathom the mysteries of the human
condition. We feel the inner shape and logic to the story, as
though a deep natural current is carrying the patient, the
analyst, and us along with them toward clear water. And we
notice our feelings anging toward the patient: from someone
who seems “other” to someone we find ourselves identifying
with. is aitude of believing in order to see opens us to a
seeing we can really believe, and thus this is also a story about
hope—hope for very troubled people and for psyoanalysis
itself.
As we read this book, we of course notice a second story,
parallel to the story of the patient and the analyst: the story of
the analyst and his supervisory relationship with Dr. Volkan. A
supervisor telling the story of a psyoanalysis is rare in the
literature. It has disadvantages, including limited access to the
full range of the data. But it also has advantages; it’s a kind of
super-vision, an integrative overseeing, whi grasps the flow
and the whole in ways the analyst might be too close to to
fully appreciate. And this super-vision sees the analyst clearly
as well, including the way that his process reacts to or
facilitates the patient’s process.
Dr. Volkan is certainly a mentor for the analyst, as well as a
guide and support, and perhaps something more as well: the
word “therapist” has, within its Greek etymology, a meaning of
“the second in combat” (Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004), the one
standing behind the warrior as both a figure of care and
comradeship. We feel this in the relationship between the
analyst and Dr. Volkan. We hear the analyst’s confession of
worrisome enactment, as the life history of the patient collides
with his own in the transference and countertransference. But
we also hear Dr. Volkan’s counsel toward the progressive: his
advice that the analyst find words to convey that, through the
enactment, “We can tou the story; it’s between us now.” Dr.
Volkan clearly holds the boundary between being the analyst’s
supervisor and being his analyst; but as supervisor, his
therapeutic aention and care tou us as well.
As does his aention and care for the patients and therapists
he listens to at Riggs case conferences. “Help the patient
become curious.” “Collect data.” “Listen for the story.” “Try not
to get caught up in ba-and-forth talk; ‘Um Hum’ is enough.”
ese and other bits of simple, grounding tenical advice
encourage a therapeutic patience and an analytic aitude. As
I’ve let his question, “What are we treating?” resonate inside
me over time, I’ve found myself thinking that we psyologist-
psyoanalysts—who bring our own professional expertise and
vantage point to the work—would nevertheless do well to
locate the doctor in ourselves. For all of the problems
associated with Freud’s metaphor of psyoanalysis as surgery,
we are treating, and we are treating something. In
psyoanalysis we set in motion—and stay with ea step of
the way—a treatment process, an opening up of the self. We
take the patient into psyoanalytic care, try to manage pain,
make our interpretive “cut”, aend to complications—in the
patient and in ourselves—and, if things go well, facilitate a
recuperative process.
is book tells the story of one su treatment between a
patient and a doctor. It ends with reference to the termination
process and to the concept of a second look (Novey, 1968) at
one’s life and one’s treatment. e book itself makes the
important case that we in psyoanalysis need to report these
stories of completed treatments, so that the field can have a
second look at its formulations, its interventions, and especially
its results. In an era when psyoanalysis is dismissed as not
“evidence-based”, among other criticisms, we need to hear and
to tell these stories—stories of profoundly pathological human
conditions successfully treated. Indeed we need to make the
case—as this book implicitly does—that treatment success with
this kind of human trouble, not to mention the depth and
breadth of the patient’s ange, could not be achieved any other
way.

Supervision is a kind of second look. And, etymologically, a

second look is the definition of respect. is patient and analyst
were extraordinarily fortunate to have Dr. Volkan provide that
deeply respectful second look, along with his serving as a
second-in-combat, close to the front, so to speak. And we too
are extremely fortunate to be given this intimate look into su
allenging, rewarding, and personal work, guided along the
way by a truly masterful mentor.
References

Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.
London: Free Association.
Davoine, F., & Gaudillière, J. M. (2004). History Beyond Trauma. New York: Other
Press.
Fromm, M. G. (2012a). Taking the Transference, Reaching toward Dreams: Clinical
Studies in the Intermediate Area. London: Karnac.
Fromm, M. G. (2012b). Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations.
London: Karnac.
Novey, S. (1968). The Second Look: The Reconstruction of Personal History in
Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Volkan, V., Ast, G., & Greer, W. (2002). The Third Reich in the Unconscious:
Transgenerational Transmission and its Consequences. New York: Brunner-
Routledge.
Winnico, D. W. (1947). Hate in the countertransference. In: Through Paediatrics to
Psycho-Analysis, (pp. 194–203). New York: Basic, 1958.
CHAPTER ONE

My behind-the-scenes work with

Peter

I n the 1980s I was the medical director of the University of

Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital in Charloesville, Virginia,
whi had 600 beds for individuals with mental as well as some
ronic physical problems su as diabetes or neurological
malfunctions, and outpatient facilities for persons with the
same conditions. Alongside my administrative duties I also
found enough time to practise and tea psyoanalysis at the
same location. One day I received a telephone call from a
former mentor who had been one of my supervisors when I
was studying to become a psyoanalyst. He asked me if I
would meet with Dr. Pine, who had very recently become his
patient, and help Dr. Pine to restart his own practice as a
psyoanalyst. He informed me that Dr. Pine, a psyiatrist,
had gone through his training analysis and had been trained as
a psyoanalyst at a psyoanalytic institute some distance
from Virginia where he had practised his profession until he
experienced some disturbing family problems. My former
mentor did not give me details of Dr. Pine’s personal problems,
but informed me that aer his wife le him and soon aer they
were divorced, Dr. Pine had become depressed and stopped
practising psyoanalysis. I was told that he and his ex-wife
had no ildren and he had lived alone for four years while his
office remained closed. en, a year before our conversation,
Dr. Pine had moved to Virginia, opened an office, and started
practising psyotherapy. Recently he had begun his second
personal psyoanalysis with my former mentor and was
hoping to return to practising psyoanalysis when he felt
comfortable enough to do so.
Unexpectedly, a man seeking psyoanalysis, who turned
out to be Peter, came to see Dr. Pine, and since he had been
away from the psyoanalytic world for years, Dr. Pine felt
that he should consult someone and receive supervision. Not
knowing who to call, he had asked his analyst for a name and
my former mentor agreed to introduce us. Looking ba, I
suspect that before calling me my mentor had heard something
about the man who had come to see Dr. Pine. He said nothing
about him however, and I agreed to meet Dr. Pine. My former
mentor (now long dead) and I never spoke about Dr. Pine
again, even during professional meetings.
When Dr. Pine came to see me I was expecting a man
younger than me, but he was about my age. He was very
polite, and he related his history, whi my mentor had already
told me, without adding mu new material. At his new
location in Virginia he had opened an office ten months
previous to our meeting, advertised as a psyoanalyst in the
local telephone book, and had already seen patients for
evaluation and short-term treatment. He told me that a man
named Peter seeking psyoanalysis had opened the telephone
book, seen his advertisement, and made an appointment to see
him two days later. is excited Dr. Pine greatly since he
wanted to return to the profession for whi he was trained.
Aer several meetings with Peter however, he was puzzled
about what to do with him and was not even sure if Peter was
suitable for analysis. His wish to restart his psyoanalytic
practice won the day; he accepted Peter as a patient, arranging
to see him four times a week, and now asked me if I would be
his consultant. I said “yes.” Dr. Pine ended up coming to my
office once a week for five years. roughout this time I would
learn more about Dr. Pine’s life, but never intimate details. He
kept a highly professional relationship with me, and we never
saw ea other outside of my office. He never aended
psyoanalytic meetings and, as far as I know, Peter was the
only person he analysed—while meeting with me once a week
—aer moving to Virginia and reopening his practice. My
involvement with Peter through five years of Dr. Pine’s work
with him taught me a great deal, whi I will now begin to
share with the reader.
 During his first visit to Dr. Pine’s office Peter informed him
that he had a history of heavy drinking and had aended some
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the past. Peter’s job did not
require that he stay put in an office from nine to five, and he
was constantly on the move meeting politicians, business
people, and others involved in the weapons industry. For some
time prior to coming to see Dr. Pine, Peter customarily had
three- to four-Martini lunes and he could manage this. e
weekend before calling Dr. Pine Peter and his wife Patsy were
at a dinner party in Rimond, Virginia, aended by several
governors from southern states and high-level business leaders.
Apparently at the dinner party he had had too many alcoholic
drinks and ended up vomiting on one of the governors siing
next to him at the table. Patsy was terribly embarrassed. When
they returned home she told her husband to enter into
psyoanalysis right away or she would definitely leave him.
Patsy was born in the South, the daughter of a former
governor. I do not recall the details of how the couple met.
ey had three daughters; one had just entered college away
from home and the other two, fraternal twins, were still in high
sool and living at home. Patsy had undergone psyoanalysis
and apparently this helped her to continue to live with Peter—
no doubt a difficult thing to do, as the reader will see—and
raise her daughters. e incident at the dinner party apparently
made her feel that she had had enough; she became very upset
and demanded that Peter started anging, or else.
Aer receiving this ultimatum from his wife, Peter looked
through the telephone book, saw Dr. Pine’s name, and called
for an appointment. When he appeared at the psyoanalyst’s
office a few days later he aracterised himself as one of the
most important people in the United States. Peter had served in
the Vietnam War. Since there was no official declaration of this
war, the general view is that it started in the mid- or late 1950s.
Before this war came to an end in 1975, Peter had become
involved in manufacturing and selling military hardware, from
contemporary weapons to those still considered government
secrets. He told Dr. Pine that the success of the company with
whi he was associated primarily depended on his most
brilliant skills as a lobbyist and manufacturer of weapons. Peter
stated that the population of the United States depended on
him since his weapons could protect American lives. His
weapons, he added, could kill thousands or millions of
enemies, and Dr. Pine noted that while talking about them he
showed no emotional response to their deadly functions.
Peter seemed to be dependent on Patsy and very anxious
about the possibility that she might leave him, but at the same
time he declared that he felt a la of closeness to his family.
He told Dr. Pine that he was sexually inhibited and
commented, “I don’t really like my ildren. I am glad that the
older one is now away from home. e twins get on my
nerves. eir mother takes care of them.” He mentioned how
this seemed wrong to him, but he was not about to take steps
to alter the situation. He described Patsy as strong-willed, and
indicated that he unenthusiastically let her manage the
family’s social life. Mother and daughters seemed to have lives
of their own. He described how he did not wish to fight with
Patsy and when he could not find a good excuse he would
accompany her to social events but feel like a robot in su
situations.
Peter bragged about the amount of money he was making.
Patsy and the ildren were well taken care of financially. e
family had a very nice house in whi he had a huge special
room where he could be alone. He mentioned that he was a
hunter and his hobby was taxidermy. When not working or
hunting he said he went to taxidermy shops and talked with
other hunters. He implied that su places belonged to another
world and while he was there he was a different person. At the
taxidermist he could even tell dirty jokes and laugh. Dr. Pine
learned that some of Peter’s kills had been stuffed and hung on
the walls of his special room.
When Dr. Pine enquired about Peter’s ildhood, Peter
briefly described how his biological father had le the family
when he was six weeks old and how Gregory entered his life
when he was three. Although Gregory would not speak about
his war experiences, Peter knew he had worked on submarines,
was a demolition expert, and had survived the Bataan Death
Mar, losing 65 pounds and undergoing torture that many of
his companions had not survived. He had been good to Peter,
and Peter considered him his hero. In fact, from ildhood on
he had called the older man “father”. Gregory was the one who
arranged for Peter to go to a military academy and the one
who taught him to be a hunter.
According to Dr. Pine, Peter did not to wish to talk mu
about his ildhood and anged the topic quily to focus on
his war experiences in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. He told
Dr. Pine that he had twenty physicians, including three
psyiatrists, under his command. Peter did not think mu of
any of them, especially the three psyiatrists whom he
perceived as belonging to the lowest level of the medical
profession. He added that he did not really care about Dr. Pine
or undertaking psyoanalysis. He was sure that he was mu
smarter than Dr. Pine and unlike him he was rubbing elbows
with very powerful individuals. All he wanted was to come to
see the doctor four times a week. is way his wife, believing
he was undergoing psyoanalysis, would not leave him.
When fiy minutes were up, Dr. Pine asked Peter to come to
talk to him again and together they would decide how to
proceed. A few days later Peter appeared on time at Dr. Pine’s
office and right away launed into a long discussion of his
involvement in a half-billion-dollar project. e day before he
had gone to Washington in his fancy auffeur-driven car and
had a Martini lun with some senators and congressmen. He
took pains to let Dr. Pine know that he was at home at seats of
power and could scarcely expect the analyst to grasp how
exciting his exalted situation was.
Dr. Pine explained to me that he felt like Peter was living in
a glorious castle, but he had loed the gates and would not
allow Dr. Pine to enter and look around. Nevertheless, Dr. Pine
admied that the idea of someone important coming to his
office because he had advertised himself as a psyoanalyst
and the possibility of having this person on his cou was very
appealing to him, despite the fact that this man severely
beliled him throughout his second visit. is visit ended
when Peter, as if Dr. Pine had nothing to say on this maer,
declared that he would go hunting for a few days and, upon
returning home, he would start seeing Dr. Pine four times a
week.
Peter appeared at Dr. Pine’s office five days later and
reported that he had gone to Alaska, flown over a herd of deer
in a helicopter and gunned down the whole herd with a
maine gun. He described vividly how the bullets made the
animals fall to the ground, some of them exploding. He felt
thrilled. Dr. Pine told me that listening to Peter and wating
his body movements imitating maine gunning the animals
scared him. He wanted so mu to have an analytic patient,
but now he did not know what to say to Peter and what to do.
He sensed that Peter’s mass killing of animals was connected
with his feeling humiliated by his wife’s demand that he get
psyoanalytic treatment. When he enquired if Peter had
hunted down whole herds of deer on other occasions, Peter
said that he had. e urge to hunt beyond accepted
conventional customs would especially emerge when Peter
faced threats of separation, su as Patsy going to visit her
family in the deep South, or threats to his omnipotence, su as
when the United States Congress refused to give permission—
aer Peter had expended mu effort trying to obtain that
permission—for the manufacture of certain weapons. e
analyst noted once more how dependent Peter seemed to be on
his wife, and how he would sear for ways to express his
omnipotence, power, and sadism in order to deny this
dependency.
When he calmed down and controlled his fear, Dr. Pine was
able to hold on to his psyoanalytic identity, whi he had not
visited for the previous five years, and calmly tried to induce
curiosity in Peter about a link between his last hunting trip and
his feeling obliged to seek treatment. But Peter cut him short
and continued to give details of other hunting trips during
whi he had slaughtered animals. He was addicted to
slaughter, and sought more and more opportunities to carry it
out and brag about it aerwards. en he gave a “lecture” on
rituals and the morality of big-game hunting, the codification
of whi influenced the way he hunted in an unintegrated way,
not unlike the coexistence of religious dogma with the
manhunt allowed in warfare. When not busy at work, Peter
travelled to far-off places su as India to hunt tigers, cobras,
and other exotic creatures. In a sense he was carrying on a
private war against animals.
Peter told Dr. Pine that during the Vietnam War he had
become a national hero because of his daring helicopter aas
on the enemy. Without expressing remorse Peter described
how, besides killing dozens and dozens of enemy fighters, he
had killed some Vietnamese women and ildren by maine
gunning them from above because Viet Cong guerrillas were
among them. Without waiting for the analyst to say
something, Peter apparently went on making statements
justifying his killing of these women and ildren in the
interest of protecting American lives. He was extremely proud
that he had received three Bronze Star Medals. While he
survived the war, forty-eight of his helicopter buddies had been
killed. Peter expressed his rage against “peaceniks,” calling
them “murderers”. Peaceniks, he declared, wanted the
Americans to die at the hands of their enemies. en, looking
straight in Dr. Pine’s eyes, he told the analyst about his fancy
guns at home. He especially focused on a Soviet-made AK-47
rifle that he had brought from Vietnam and was using for
hunting. Dr. Pine shared with me his fear that Peter might also
call him a “peacenik” or “murderer” and threaten to shoot him
with his AK-47. It was under su conditions that Dr. Pine
agreed to start Peter’s treatment and see him four hours a week
on four different days.
When Peter came to his first official treatment session Dr.
Pine expected him to begin by lying on the psyoanalytic
cou, but Peter spurned the cou, eager to demonstrate that
he was in control. Dr. Pine sensed that his patient perceived
lying on the cou as evidence of dependency and that this was
unacceptable, so he agreed to work face-to-face and told his
patient that he could lie on the cou when he felt ready to do
so.
Peter launed into an account of his frequent visits to
Washington and how he was driven from his home in Virginia
by his auffeur or flown by private helicopter. He spoke of the
influential officials he was on familiar terms with and with
whom he was spending so mu time. “I guess I can tell you
about this missile,” he said in a patronising tone, named the
missile and added, “at isn’t classified information.” He
seemed to be reassuring himself that he had adequate defences
against a personal fear of some undefined enemy—perhaps the
analyst.
Within the first week of treatment, during whi Dr. Pine
was somewhat bewildered and did not say mu, Peter stopped
drinking completely and declared that the bulimic practices he
had engaged in were no longer a problem. He had cured
himself! Any dependency on someone else, the analyst, had
been removed. During the next hours he spoke about working
on hunting trophies—a ralesnake and a bla bear—and his
visits to taxidermists to find natural-looking eyes for the bla
bear.
When, less than a month since commencing treatment, Peter
obtained his company’s selement on a forty-million-dollar
arms deal, he felt most powerful but not elated. Now he
wanted to terminate his treatment, saying that he was in any
case alright since he had stopped drinking; it was not he who
was “on the sauce” now, but a certain congressman, and he
claimed that he no longer overate and vomited. He sought to
console Dr. Pine, saying, “You are a nice man; I hope you take
no offence if I stop.” Yet, it appeared as if he wanted Dr. Pine’s
permission to end treatment.
It was at this time that Dr. Pine consulted me. Aer
discussing Peter’s case using the data available at that time, Dr.
Pine agreed with me that he should make a statement to the
patient when they met the next day: “ere are two persons in
this room. You are here because, as you told me, your wife
insisted that you get psyoanalytic treatment. I am here as a
psyoanalyst, as it was advertised in the telephone book. I am
not your wife’s agent and if you oose to continue to meet
with me in the future too I will not be an agent of your wife.
Whenever we are together, even when you declare that you are
in my office so that your wife thinks that you are in
psyoanalysis, I will remain curious to find out the meanings
of your life events, including why you are in this room with
me above and beyond your going along with your wife’s wish.
I cannot find su meanings unless you join me and be curious
too. At this time you may wonder if there are things in your
life that you wish to understand beer and oose to ange.
You decide whether or not to continue treatment.”
Peter ose to stay in treatment. As I will describe, he
developed what I call a “glass bubble” transference, in whi a
patient who exhibits exaggerated narcissism fantasises existing
in something like a glass bubble, whi constitutes a kingdom
in whi the individual is number one and holds sway over a
universe of his or her own (Volkan, 1979; Volkan & Ast, 1994).
e glass bubble transference is similar to Arnold Modell’s
(1975) “cocoon phase” in the analysis of individuals with
narcissistic personality organisation. Marie Rudden (2011)
described a patient who defensively withdrew to “a private
internal space” or a “cocoon-place” (p. 359) where he
entertained grandiose, erotic, and aggressive daydreams. She
also reviewed psyoanalytic literature on su hiding places.
It is clear that individuals with different psyological make-up
dri into these places and oen keep them hidden from others
(see also: Ogden, 2010).
A person with narcissistic personality organisation does not
hide his fantasy, thinking, and behaviour about living alone in
a kingdom or empire under a glass bubble. Su individuals
wat the outside world through the glass and evaluate
dangers against their sense of grandiosity. ey devalue those
presenting su dangers and, when this is not enough, try to
get rid of them symbolically—and very seldom actually. Stone
(1989, 2009) surveyed the American and British literature on
celebrated murder cases and suggested that one can discern a
distinct narcissistic element in them. He does not clearly
differentiate issues of narcissism in general from narcissistic
personality organisation. Biographical examinations in Stone’s
book, as expected, are limited. I carefully wated interviews
with Ted Bundy, one of the most flagrant serial killers, and
read about his life and activities (Miaud & Aynesworth,
2000), and I agree with Stone that Ted Bundy most likely had a
severe malignant personally organisation.
Peter had his own name for his “glass bubble” without being
fully aware of its psyological implications. He called it an
“island empire” in whi he lived alone. He knew a man who
did own an island and he envied him deeply. I shared with Dr.
Pine that he should expect Peter, during the initial phase of his
analysis, to behave in a way that would keep the analyst
outside of his imaginary island since, like the three
psyiatrists in Vietnam under Peter’s command, he would not
rate admission. Dr. Pine would need to wait until the right time
to be admied to this island and allowed to stay there and look
around with Peter. I told Dr. Pine that Peter would continue to
belile him, because Peter, under the directions of his
personality organisation, had no other oice but to behave as
an obnoxious person. I agreed that hearing some of Peter’s
stories also made me feel like vomiting. If Dr. Pine could hold
on to his psyoanalytic identity, not perceive aas on him
as a personal issue, remain curious about what Peter would do
and how he would behave, as well as what he would induce in
the analyst’s mind, we could take a very interesting trip
together in trying to analyse Peter.
CHAPTER TWO

What makes a person live in an

“island empire”?

W hen I started supervising Peter’s case, Dr. Pine did not

have most of the information about Peter’s ildhood
or Gregory’s relationship with him that I included in the
introductory apter of this book. is information, along with
other stories of Peter’s ildhood, whi I will describe soon,
would become available to me during the first nine or ten
months of Peter’s treatment. However, Dr. Pine and I, by
observing Peter’s symptoms and his behaviour paerns within
Dr. Pine’s office and outside in his daily life, came to a
conclusion that Peter had a narcissistic personality
organisation.
From the standpoint of semantics, the term “narcissism” in
Sigmund Freud’s work has different meanings. Willy Baranger
(1991) classifies these various meanings into three categories.
e first group relates essentially to narcissism as one of the
forms or vicissitudes of libido. In the second group, the
emphasis falls on the object in the narcissistic states, and the
problems of narcissism come together with those of
identification in its introjective form. e final group consists
of extensions of the term to refer to aitudes, feelings, and
aracter traits indicative of the valuation, devaluation, or
overvaluation of some aspects of the person. In this book, I am
focusing on the final group when I speak of narcissistic
personality organisation.
Some years prior to meeting Dr. Pine I had begun to see
patients with low-level personality organisation on the cou,
and I had also wrien and lectured about my observations and
findings about them (Volkan, 1976), including cases of
narcissistic personality organisation. is was one of the
reasons I easily accepted this work with Dr. Pine.
 Salman Akhtar (1992, 2009) states that the term “personality”
subsumes the concepts of “temperament” and “aracter”.
Temperament refers to the composite of genetically transmied
affectomotor assets and vulnerabilities of an individual.
Character, on the other hand, denotes ego-syntonic and
rationalised ways of thinking, fantasizing, and behaving that
have originated in one’s developmental experiences. When we
combine temperament and aracter under the umbrella of
personality, we are speaking of personality as an organisation.
Personality organisation exhibits itself by observable,
customary, and—under average expectable circumstances—
reasonably predictable paerns of an individual’s day-to-day
behaviour. is paern is relatively stable and largely ego-
syntonic. Its aim is to maintain a stable reciprocal relationship
between a person and her environment, and to determine her
intrapsyic and interpersonal harmony. A personality
organisation, however, can be ronically maladaptive and a
constant source of interpersonal problems and object relations
conflicts. In spite of this, maladaptive personality organisations
are also ego-syntonic, accepted and unquestioned by the
individuals themselves. One of the maladaptive personality
organisations is the narcissistic personality organisation.
Due to scientific observations of infants during the last few
decades, we know that an infant’s mind is more active than we
thought it was when I began my psyoanalytic training
decades ago. e interplay between age-appropriate
experiences and the maturation of the central nervous system
in the development of what psyoanalysts call “ego functions”
and ability to form mental images of relationships with others
(“object relations”) have been scientifically studied, especially
since the 1970s (Stern, 1985; Emde, 1991; Lehtonen, 2003;
Bloom, 2010). One fact we learned is that no maer how mu
potential and ability an infant possesses, in infancy no one has
a fully separate self; the infant’s mind can be conceptualised as
being in a creative state of confusion. A very small ild’s
sense of genuine “I” evolves slowly. Among the many tasks
that infants need to accomplish include knowing themselves as
psyologically separate from their caretakers and also clearly
distinguishing between others. e now classic finding on this
topic was reported by Rene Spitz in 1965. Around the eighth
month of life, infants develop an unambiguous fear of
strangers, moving away from them, crying, whimpering, and
showing signs of dislike. is fear of a stranger who has caused
the infant no pain and whose intent is benevolent is known as
“stranger anxiety”. is means that the infant begins to
differentiate more clearly between people in his environment.
Another task is to learn that the mother (or other caretaker)
who gratifies them and the mother who frustrates them are the
same person, and correspondingly, the loved and rejected
infant is also a single individual. Infants need to accomplish the
mending of opposites (Kernberg, 1976; Volkan, 1976).
One of the pioneers of scientific observations of infants,
Daniel Stern (1985), reminds us that an infant is fed four to six
times a day. Ea feeding experience produces different degrees
of pleasure. As the ild grows up, in a sense, different
experiences become categorised in the ild’s mind as “good”
and “bad”. Loving and frustrating, as well as loved and
frustrated, aspects of people connected with these experiences
too are divided until the integrative function is effectively
accomplished. e ild’s subjective sense of her integrated self
is the ild’s personal identity. If the ild cannot fully
accomplish the integrative task, due to biological as well as
environmental reasons, the individual’s identity, even in
adulthood, remains divided. For persons like those with
narcissistic personality organisation, the developmental
spliing, whi in normal development largely disappears,
evolves as a defensive spliing. e “number one” aspect of
individuals with narcissistic personality organisation reflects
what has come to be known in the psyoanalytic literature as
the “grandiose self”. e part that is associated with
dependency and inferiority is called their “hungry self”
(Volkan, 1995, 2010). ese two parts are separated by a
defensive spliing meanism.
 e term “grandiose self” in reference to persons with
narcissistic personality organisation was first used by Heinz
Kohut (1971) reflecting the untamed grandiose self of
ildhood. Oo Kernberg (1975) used the same term when
describing persons with narcissistic personality organisation.
However, his term, “grandiose self” reflects a pathological
structure, a composition of three elements:
a. e real self-representation: is refers to the specialness of
the ild whi is reinforced by early experience. e
examination of the early life history of persons with
narcissistic personality organisation shows that in early
ildhood they are perceived as special—for example, as the
future saviour of the family name or fortune—by the
parenting figures.
b. e ideal self: is is formed to compensate the ild for
frustration at the oral level of rage and envy. Later it is
reinforced by further compensations to deal with
frustrations at higher levels.
c. e ideal object: It refers to a fantasised image of the
limitlessly providing mother or the caretaker who
constantly provides, supports, and maintains the ild’s
self-esteem.
In a paper (Volkan, 1982) I compared Kohut’s and Kernberg’s
views on narcissistic personality organisation (also see Akhtar,
1989). In this book my description of grandiose self is similar to
Kernberg’s description of this term. However, I combine
pathology of object relations, whi is Kernberg’s focus in the
individuals with narcissistic personality organisation, with
their problems of developmental deficiencies.
ere are various types of adjustment to narcissistic
personality organisation. For example, there are even
individuals with masoistic narcissistic personality
organisation who hide their grandiose selves behind a
behaviour paern that says, “I am the number one sufferer in
the world” (Cooper, 1989; Volkan, 2010). ose who can hold on
to their grandiose selves daily by finding a fit between its
demands and the environment, as well as those people who can
establish sublimations, or even those who have what Oo
Kernberg (1975) called “pseudo-sublimations”, can effectively
hide their utilisation of defensive spliing. ere are also those
with similar internal worlds who make “successful”
adjustments. By “successful” I am not simply referring to the
individual’s standing in society. I am describing the stability of
the grandiose self and its verification by others so that a fit
occurs between the individual’s internal demand and his
interpersonal relationships. Others consider su a person who
usually establishes himself as a leader of an organisation or
even a country, to be someone who is superior (Volkan, 2010). I
suspected that some persons working for Peter and/or geing
involved in tenical and business aspects of his work might
have considered Peter to be “superior”, while others perceived
him as “arrogant.”
I could not say Peter had a “successful” narcissistic
personality organisation since oen he could not succeed in
hiding his “hungry self” as an adult, even though he would
deny having it. Dr. Pine noted that Peter took pains not to lose
his source of dependence while showing off his grandiose self;
for example, while in the midst of highly successful parleys at
the Capitol or in some governor’s office, he would call Patsy on
the telephone five to ten times. He told Dr. Pine that his wife
was an “excellent” cook; he would call her ahead of time to
find out what he would be served at the dinner table.
Everything had to be under his control. He would eat large
amounts and retain the food he had eaten within himself for
several hours under his control before vomiting. When he
could not hide something “bad” in himself or about himself,
Peter would even make this aracteristic and/or his
management of it “number one”. For example, he would say
that he was the “best bulimia patient” in the world; his
unpleasant symptoms had to be superior. en he would brag
about how he had trained his abdominal muscles so he could
vomit at will. Peter also needed to collect “aggressive
triumphs” and exhibit sadism to protect his grandiose self. e
most suitable diagnosis describing Peter’s internal world would
be a malignant narcissistic personality organisation.
While persons with “typical” narcissistic personality
organisation usually utilise teasing, slander, hurtful remarks, or
simply fantasies in order to put down people or things
representing their hungry selves or representing threats to their
grandiose selves, those whom we consider having malignant
narcissistic personality organisation exhibit more exaggerated
sadistic expressions whi cause pain and even bodily damage
to others—in Peter’s case bodily damage to animals. If physical
pain and injury are a requisite for a sexual relationship, we say
that the person with malignant personality organisation also
has a sexual perversion. Peter described having a sensation of
being thrilled while massacring a herd of deer or pa of
wolves but without sexualising this sensation. In fact, he had
told Dr. Pine how inhibited he was sexually.
In our routine daily lives everyone requires the help of
someone else for one thing or another. A person who has a
narcissistic personality organisation oen assigns a needed
helper in one of two categories: the “other” is a superior person
—she is an extension of the patient’s grandiose self and/or an
adorer of the patient’s grandiose self. For example, Peter
repeated on several occasion that his auffeur was a direct
descendant of omas Jefferson. I was working at Mr
Jefferson’s university, the University of Virginia—the third
President of the United States usually referred to
Charloesville as his birthplace—where I had a ance to study
and learn a great deal about this historical figure. When I heard
Peter’s auffeur’s name I knew that he was not a direct
descendant of omas Jefferson. But, apparently Peter
“believed” that he was. Alternatively, for the person with
narcissistic personality organisation, a helper is inferior. By
comparison to an inferior person, the grandiosity of an
individual with narcissistic personality organisation can be
confirmed. Or if the helper presents a threat to a person’s
grandiose self, the threat is removed because of this person’s
inferiority.
 erefore, it will not be surprising that persons with
narcissistic personality organisation develop intense
narcissistic transference manifestations as soon as their
treatment starts. is requires considering modifications to
classical psyoanalytic tenique. In 1912 Freud wrote that
advances in the experience of psyoanalysts would lead to a
consensus about the most expedient teniques. In 1919 he was
ready to admit that psyoanalytic understanding was
incomplete, and that methods could be altered as more was
learned. He expected improvements in psyoanalytic
tenique. As new theoretical orientations evolved through the
decades, and as psyoanalysts began working with individuals
previously thought of as unsuitable candidates for
psyoanalysis, Freud’s followers called for new tenical
approaes.
When psyoanalysts began to work with patients formerly
considered unapproaable due to their ego weaknesses or ego
deficiencies, they in general resorted to supportive measures.
ey called su approaes a “preparation for analysis”
(Rapaport, 1960). e idea was that through supportive
measures the patient’s ego would be strengthened, and aer
this strength had been established the patient would be ready
for real analysis. While some analysts’ ideas about supportive
measures were dominated by sound theoretical principles and
were directed towards an increase in the patient’s ego
functions, at other times, with or without anowledgment, the
idea of supportive measures led the analyst to become a
manager of the patient’s life.
Because most of the “preparation for analysis” period was
non-psyoanalytic, the analyst identified the treatment of
su patients by names su as psyoanalytic psyotherapy
or intensive psyotherapy. In general, in these situations, there
was a tacit anowledgement that further regression in these
already regressed patients was bad. Without therapeutic
regression the tenique could not be psyoanalytic. Peter
even refused to lie on the cou. Dr. Pine and I decided that Dr.
Pine would not provide “supportive therapy” for Peter—I
thought that if we ose su an approa it would not be
effective in Peter’s case. Our approa from the very beginning
would be psyoanalytic. At this phase of Peter’s treatment
this would include noting the patient’s resistances to treatment
and his transference manifestations without the analyst’s
premature interferences.
On the surface, manifestations of the narcissistic
transference can be variable, but a closer look illustrates that
all variations have the same motivation: to protect and
maintain the grandiose self. e patient may behave as if the
analyst is a superior being, beer than any therapist in the
world. But, the patient uses this as a shield for his grandiose
self. More oen, as Peter had done, su an individual puts
down the therapist as an inferior being, so that by comparison
to the therapist his grandiose self continues to shine. If
everything goes well, su manifestations will evolve into a
“workable narcissistic transference” when the patients can
observe it with the analyst and be curious about it. Aer a long
time, typically years later, su patients’ workable narcissistic
transferences usually turn into a condition that corresponds to
transference neurosis of a person with neurotic personality
organisation.
Persons with narcissistic personality organisation initially
induce counter-responses in the analyst, anging from elation
—when the patient relates to the analyst as if the analyst is
number one in the world—to boredom and anger—when the
patient treats the analyst as inferior (Volkan, 1981a). I knew
that one of my initial focuses in supervising Dr. Pine would be
to notice his counter-responses and help him to tame them so
that he could stay curious and protect the necessity to develop
a therapeutic cooperation with Peter, as well as to help Peter to
be genuinely curious about his behaviour, thinking, and affects
and their unconscious sources. e analyst needs to wait and
not prematurely “aa” the patient’s narcissistic transference
manifestations.
Aer Dr. Pine and Peter began meeting regularly four times
a week, face-to-face, Peter would oen simply sit in front of
Dr. Pine as if he were in a different world and would not speak.
Sometimes he would look at a corner of Dr. Pine’s office and
other times he would look at Dr. Pine. When he did the laer,
Dr. Pine would think that his patient was behaving as if he was
not seeing his analyst. When the analyst enquired what was in
Peter’s mind during his long silences, Peter at first did not
respond. Sometime later he told Dr. Pine that he was living in
an “island empire”. He volunteered to add that while spending
hours alone in his huge special room with his hunting trophies
on the walls (stuffed animals) he would also fantasise being on
his island alone. Without describing further what it was like
living alone on an island, he said that someone like Dr. Pine—
an inferior being, one supposes—could not understand his
experience.
Peter’s talking about an “island empire” did not surprise me.
I had already analysed individuals with narcissistic personality
organisation who had exhibited very similar phenomena. For
example, I had a patient who, like Peter, also lived on an island.
His description of his experience was his being “Robinson
Crusoe without Man Friday”. Another patient of mine, a
professionally very successful man like Peter, lived in an “iron
ball”. Still another patient, this time a woman, experienced
herself as a “flower in a glass bubble” (Volkan, 1973, 1979;
Volkan & Ast, 1994). Sometimes when this last patient was
lying on my analytic cou it would seem as if my words
would hit her glass enclosure and bounce ba. ey would not
enter her world and she would not hear me. My work with this
patient anged drastically aer many months when she
reported a dream in whi her glass bubble containing a flower
fell on the floor, smashing the glass.
An iron ball, a glass bubble, or a cocoon surrounds the
patient’s grandiose self like water surrounds a private island.
But patients who have su enclosures or live in isolated island
kingdoms develop very intense, sometimes hidden,
transference manifestations. Even when they are in an iron
ball, they find ways to constantly observe “others”—when in
treatment, the analyst—outside of their lonely kingdom. e
patient will try to establish whether the outsider is dangerous
or an adorer; if this person can be a reservoir for the patient’s
hungry self, or a protector of the patient’s grandiose self. When
it occurs in the treatment situation I prefer to name it “the
glass bubble transference” instead of “cocoon transference”,
since glass is transparent and thus illustrates the fact that the
patient can constantly see what is outside.
When not staying silent and exhibiting himself on his island
alone during his sessions, Peter would continue to brag. I do
not wish to bore the reader with more examples of his exhibits
of grandiosity. When—I think with my support—Dr. Pine
started to “tolerate” more comfortably Peter’s approa to him,
slowly and gently he began to collect more data so that we
could beer understand why Peter grew up to become a person
with a malignant narcissistic personality organisation.
I already noted from my previous work with patients with
narcissistic personality organisation that su a person during
ildhood is le emotionally hungry and humiliated during
dyadic relationships, with a cold, ungiving mother or
mothering person. However, when under these conditions,
again in a dyadic relationship, the mother or caretaker sees
something special in the ild, she may give the ild a grand
task. For example, a ild born aer the family experienced an
economic calamity and lost its fortune, can unconsciously be
selected by the mother and other family members as the one
who will re-establish the family’s lost fortune in the future.
is makes the ild’s specialness “real” and the ild develops
the nucleus of his grandiose self. Sometimes the ild with
“cold” mothering experiences finds a “saviour” in his
environment. e internalisation of this “saviour’s”
realistic/fantasised image evolves as the nucleus of grandiosity.
And still sometimes this ild, even as an adult, may need the
same “saviour”, or her replacement in the external world, to
refuel the grandiose core that continues to reverse humiliating
situations.
In individuals who develop narcissistic personality
organisation, the mastery of this reversal is never totally
aieved. e best they can do is to continue to possess both
the collection of their inferior, humiliated, traumatised self-
images and internalised object images that sear for libidinal
objects but never find them, and the collection of superior self-
and internalised object images inflated with grandiosity and
aggression. e internalised object images in the second
collection include the image of the mother or mothering person
who sees something very special in the ild, su as a future
saviour of the family name or the image of a “saviour” with
whi the ild identifies and/or whi is deposited into the
ild’s developing self-representation that induces tasks to
reverse the ildhood helplessness, emotional hunger and
humiliation.
Since two collections of images are separated by a defensive
spliing, individuals with narcissistic personality organisation
never “learn,” or “learn” only very lile about, what is called
“average” in common language. is leads to some difficulty in
reality testing. Su individuals as adults can appear to be very
smart, but in the areas that are perceived as close threats to
their protecting and maintaining their grandiose selves, their
reality testing becomes weakened. e tension between split
parts becomes the source of these individuals’ primary pre-
oedipal conflicts. When sensing oedipal issues, they keep
oedipal objects, the mother and/or the father, also as split.
Progress in solving the oedipal conflict never takes place until
later in the treatment when su a patient integrates her
internal world. Patients with narcissistic personality
organisation are driven to control their interpersonal and
internalised object relationships. In this way sometimes they
appear to be neurotic obsessional individuals. But obsessional
individuals are capable of understanding other people’s
emotional depth while remaining “cold” themselves. As Salman
Akhtar states, “e obsessional seeks perfection; the narcissist
claims it” (Akhtar, 1989, p. 521).
During their initial months together, Dr. Pine tried to probe
into Peter’s ildhood experiences. Initially Peter responded
that he was “a happy fat kid”, and assured the doctor that
“there was nothing there”. Slowly we learned some details
about how he was treated by his intrusive, angry and
depressed mother and grandmother. His grandmother, with
whom he was forced to sleep during his developmental years,
apparently had facial hair and would use tweezers to remove
hair from her face in front of lile Peter. She used to wear red
underwear—Peter recalled them as “red bikinis”. In his
ildhood fantasies he oen associated the grandmother as a
“wit”, who dominated and humiliated him. He had to obey
her, otherwise God would punish him.
ere were humiliations at the hand of his biological father
too. When Peter was five his mother took him to a quarter in
the city where his biological father lived with his new wife and
their only ild—a boy. Peter was told to kno at the door and
introduce himself as the man’s son, and he did so. e man
who opened the door yelled at him and shut him out. e ild
returned in terror to his mother who was waiting at a street
corner, and recorded this event in his mind as one of extreme
humiliation.
Peter never knew whether his mother then telephoned his
father or if something else forced the father to seek out the boy,
but about a month later he took him to a fair where lile Peter
ate junk food and profusely vomited. His father never came
ba. is trip to the fair was the only actual physical
togetherness between the father and son. Dr. Pine aempted to
link Peter’s vomiting at the fair with adult Peter’s symptom of
vomiting, but Peter would not hear of su a linking
explanation. He was above thinking of being hurt by his
biological father! He declared that he did not know what had
happened to his father, and his wife and son. He never
investigated their whereabouts. Apparently when Peter was a
small ild his biological father, his second wife and his son le
the city where Peter and his mother would later live in the big
house Gregory bought. Peter insisted that he had forgoen the
names of his biological father’s second wife and their son. He
became angry at Dr. Pine for suggesting that his patient might
still be somewhat emotionally interested in “that jerk”, the
biological father. Peter declared once more that he had taken
Gregory’s last name, and that Gregory, whom he adored, was
his “father”. While Peter was growing up and later when he
was an adult his mother never talked about her first husband,
and Peter never enquired about him.
I will make a big leap here and report a dream that Peter had
in the fourth year with Dr. Pine when he was reviewing what
he had learned in his analysis. e reason for my doing so is
my belief that this dream and Peter’s associations best
summarise the meaning of Gregory’s appearance in his life.
I was a ild and standing with a handsome man—this
man looked like Gregory—when I was mu younger. I
saw red foxes running along a valley and making
disturbing sounds. e man stood there as a strong
figure and said that he could conquer the foxes in the
valley. en he pointed to another animal, a disfigured
deer with very thi, clumsy legs, and no horns.
By the time Peter reported this dream he knew a great deal
about his internal world. He quily identified red disturbing
foxes as his mother and grandmother. eir colour reminded
him of the “red bikinis” associated with the mental
representation of his grandmother. Although he could not
recall ever seeing his mother menstruating, he was certain that
he had glimpsed the women’s genitals, especially his
grandmother’s genitals since he slept with her for many years.
e good-looking man, his stepfather, could conquer his
mother’s “valley” (vagina) and could become a father figure.
is man had noticed how lile Peter was overfed by the two
women and how he was “castrated” (no horns) by them. Peter
understood how he needed to identify with Gregory, be a
hunter, and kill hundreds and hundreds of deer as
representatives of his physically and emotionally disfigured
self-representation. I will return to details of Peter’s fourth year
of analysis later.
Peter was able to freely tell Dr. Pine of his idealisation of
Gregory and his identification with the older man as his
“saviour”, as well as his need for the older man to refuel Peter’s
self-esteem, especially aer Gregory introduced him to
hunting. We would need more time to collect data indicating
that lile Peter was also a reservoir for Gregory’s traumatised
self-image, and was given tasks to save and protect this image
from future trauma. In the next apter I will describe how we
began to understand Gregory’s externalisation of his damaged
self-image in the Japanese prison camps and the depositing of
this image into Peter.
During his first nine or ten months of treatment, on rare
occasions Peter seemed to allow the possibility that Dr. Pine
might enter his “island empire”. Here is one example.
Besides staying silent, name-dropping, or bragging about
being the most important person in the United States, Peter
would also fill his sessions with endless descriptions of his
daily activities, whi reflected both sides of his narcissistic
personality organisation. However, he would refuse to follow
them up and be curious with the analyst about how he was
reliving and maintaining his ildhood experiences as an adult.
One day, without exhibiting any emotion, he announced that
one of his twin daughters, then age sixteen, had been riding in
a car with her boyfriend who had just turned eighteen and had
a driver’s education certificate. ey were in a horrible
accident; both the boy and Peter’s daughter survived. is
incident apparently made Patsy very anxious, and she could
not do her routine things for Peter, su as spending time
cooking “excellent” dinners. While describing this incident
Peter also bragged that for thirty-three years he never had any
trouble driving a car. Spontaneously, Dr. Pine wanted to show
his empathy and noted that his patient might have been
frightened over his daughter’s narrow escape. Dr. Pine was
surprised when Peter with an angry voice sarcastically asked
Dr. Pine what time he had come to work. Was Dr. Pine too
tired? Was it because of that he had made a stupid remark su
as Peter being frightened? Shortly aer this he missed a session
to aend a cotail party for the vice-president of the United
States towards whi his company had donated $100,000. In
reality, he could have come to his session and still gone to the
party. Hearing this I sensed that by going to this party instead
of coming to his session Peter was telling his analyst: “You
don’t understand me. I don’t like to hear that I can be hurt or
frightened. So I will get away from you and find another way
to pump up my grandiose self.”
During our supervision session, Dr. Pine and I discussed the
session mentioned above and Peter’s “togetherness” with the
vice-president, and understood that, even under su a
dramatic circumstance as his daughter’s near-death experience,
Peter was not ready to give up his narcissistic defences. Peter
obviously perceived his daughter’s frightening accident as
having been frustrating—the occasion of her disturbing her
father’s status quo in respect to his grandiose self. A beer
response to him would have been: “It might be unpleasant
when things happen beyond one’s control and jurisdiction.” Dr.
Pine managed to share with Peter how his daughter’s accident
was an unexpected external event that might interfere
temporarily with Peter’s involvement with big business and big
events that were important to him. Peter listened to his
analyst’s appreciation of holding on without interference to his
grandiose self. He said that he had arranged to go fishing (not
deer hunting in a murderous way this time), but now he would
come to his sessions instead of go fishing. He asked if his
analyst liked to fish, suggesting for the first time that they
might have a mutual interest. e analyst reminded Peter of
the laer’s “island empire” and wondered about the fish
around the island. e analyst added that if he was permied
to visit this island he would be interested in fishing with Peter.
CHAPTER THREE

Gregory’s birdhouse and Peter’s

raccoon experience

T he story of a mother depositing a dead ild’s image into

the self-representation of another ild born aer the loss
of the first can be dramatic. In treating su replacement
ildren, a therapist can easily find obvious signs indicating a
depositing: e mother may have frequent slips of the tongue,
calling the new ild by the name of the dead ild. She may
force the second ild to sleep in the first ild’s bed and play
with the dead ild’s toys. And the replacement ild may have
dreams in whi she is dressed like her dead sister in a picture
that her mother put on the wall of her room the day she was
born. In general, however, an adult’s depositing an image in
the developing ild’s self-representation, as well as a ild’s
identification with an adult’s image, take place silently. But on
some occasions, while analysing an individual we may notice
unusual events that we can easily connect with an adult
passing an image to a ild. For example, in a book I wrote
with Gabriele Ast and William Greer there is the story of one
of Dr. Greer’s patients, a Jewish physician, who possessed a
Nazi image within himself that would oen come to life, but
whi was rather separated from the rest of his self-
representation (Volkan, Ast, & Greer, 2002). Because of this,
while he was able to carry out a good job in a hospital, he had
another side. He would do sadistic things to women during
sexual encounters. At these times the Nazi image in him would
come to life and, in fact, he would call himself “Hitler”. As
Hitler he would beat, oke, or scrat women severely. is
was why he had to seek treatment.
Some years into his treatment the patient unrepressed a
ildhood memory. His father, who was traumatised by the
Holocaust, was a loving father. He would put his lile boy to
bed and tell him he loved him. But he had a peculiar habit. As
he turned his ba to leave the boy’s bedroom he would pass
gas on the boy, and the boy had to smell it as he fell asleep.
When Dr. Greer’s patient unrepressed su memories he
understood how his loving father symbolically became a model
of a Nazi aggressor and passed this image to his son in order to
help his son become an aggressor and not be humiliated and
hurt like he had been. As a ild Dr. Greer’s patient had no
intellectual knowledge about how the Nazis gassed the Jewish
people in concentration camps. He learned this fact later when
he could comprehend it. Nevertheless, without an intellectual
comprehension he had sensed what kind of model his father
was providing. Later in his treatment he could find other
examples of his father’s aempts to make him an aggressor.
It was clear to me that Gregory, by introducing Peter to
hunting when the boy reaed puberty, was sending a message
to Peter not to be the hunted one, like the Jewish father
traumatised by the Holocaust had done for his son. But during
Peter’s first nine to ten months of face-to-face treatment he
continued utilising intense narcissistic transference
manifestations described in Chapter Two, and su
psyological issues could not be opened up during treatment
in a fashion that would be therapeutic. When Dr. Pine found
occasions to wonder about Gregory’s role in Peter’s life, Peter
simply informed his analyst that when he was a ild Gregory
would not talk about the Bataan Death Mar or his
experiences in the horrible prisoner-of-war camps in the
Philippines. Dr. Pine only heard openly how Gregory
encouraged him to be a hunter.
Furthermore Peter did not talk about his own war
experiences in Vietnam beyond reporting how he had also
killed ildren and women, how he was shot down three times,
how many other helicopter pilots were killed while he
survived, and how he had received three Bronze Star Medals.
We did not know if he was severely traumatised during his
time in the Vietnam War or if he made any links in his mind
between Gregory’s war experiences and his own. Whenever
occasions arose for Dr. Pine to enquire about Vietnam, Peter
would say, “Why don’t you go and see the movie, Platoon.”
Platoon, a 1989 war movie, was wrien and directed by Oliver
Stone. e cast includes Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and
Charlie Sheen. Peter apparently sensed that Dr. Pine had never
participated in a war. As a superior being who knew what it
was like to be on the balefield, Peter was not about to spend
time describing it to someone who would not understand. He
told Dr. Pine that Platoon depicted war realistically, and if the
analyst wanted to learn about what war is, he should see the
movie.
Dr. Pine’s tolerance of Peter’s narcissistic transference
manifestations for over nine months began to therapeutically
link the patient to the analyst. One day while coming to his
analyst’s office Peter saw a flo of birds flying above, and he
opened his session right away by saying that wating these
birds reminded him of Gregory’s multi-storied, purple martin
house whi stood on a pole mounted in a heavy concrete base.
One of Peter’s vivid ildhood memories was observing this
birdhouse being erected in the garden of the home he, his
mother, and Gregory moved to aer they le the apartment in
the poor area of town. Apparently Gregory used an enormous
amount of cement to stabilise the base. e same birdhouse,
decades later, still stood. Speaking about this ildhood
memory, Peter did not initially aa any significance to it,
and neither did his analyst.
I was intrigued by Peter’s mention of this birdhouse, because
it indicated a drastic ange in his usual style of opening
sessions with Dr. Pine. Instead of name-dropping, bragging
about his accomplishments, or visiting his “island empire”, he
was describing how an external event, his seeing the flo of
flying birds, had stimulated his recollection of a specific
ildhood memory. I likened his seeing the flying birds to a day
residue—as described by Freud (1900a)—and his recounting the
birdhouse to reporting a dream image. At this point Peter had
never presented a dream. On a few occasions, when Peter
declared that he did not remember various things, Dr. Pine had
suggested that his dreams might help him remember what he
had forgoen. Peter would reply, “But, I do not remember any
of my dreams,” or “I don’t dream,” or “I do not see how
anybody’s dreams have anything to do with reality.” Now his
voluntary linking of an external event with a ildhood
memory, for me, was an important ange.
I also became curious about why Gregory, aer moving out
of Peter’s mother’s small apartment, whi he had used as if it
were a hiding place or a symbolic “prison”, would want to
build a multi-storied birdhouse, one that had to be substantial
enough to survive for decades. I asked Dr. Pine to collect more
information. Following my suggestions, he was able to learn
more without maine-gunning Peter with questions, but by
talking to him, sharing his curiosity, and wondering if there
were more to this birdhouse story. is time Peter was willing
to talk.
We learned that Gregory painted numbers on ea of the
many “apartments” for the bird families to occupy. Every year
he repainted these numbers before the migratory birds came
ba and occupied the house. For many decades, this same
birdhouse had been full of birds that, in due course, laid and
hated eggs and launed their fledglings. Gregory had
banded the legs of all the fledglings, marking ea with the
number of its family “apartment”. If a baby bird had an
untimely fall from the purple martin house, Gregory knew
whi “apartment” it belonged to and returned the fledgling
there. He knew a fledgling rescued by a human and returned to
the wrong “apartment” would be rejected and die.
We understood that Gregory had built a new version of the
Japanese prison camps. In the original camps there was
constant horror and death. In this new version, no occupant of
this cantonment would be allowed to die. In a creative way, by
utilising externalisation and depositing, Gregory had reversed
his past horrible, traumatising reality and developed a new
“fate” for himself and his comrades (the fledglings). In this
externally created camp everyone would be safe and fly to
freedom. He made sure that it would stay erect as long as he
lived, and through externalisation and depositing images “out
there” his problems with su images and solutions to them
could also take place “out there”. He could then have a
“normal” life without mu internal struggle.
By learning about the psyological meanisms Gregory
used in his preoccupation with the multi-storied birdhouse, we
could more easily assume that Gregory also used lile Peter as
a fledgling, aempting to save the ild and his own
externalised traumatised image he had deposited in the lile
boy. For the first time, Peter seemed to think psyologically
when Dr. Pine explained our understanding of what the
birdhouse and saving the fledglings meant for Gregory. e
real evidence of the validity of our ideas about Gregory’s
birdhouse, as I will describe later in this book, became
available to us during the termination phase of Peter’s analysis.
Since Libby, Peter’s mother, was not on our psyoanalytic
cou, we were not sure if she unconsciously “knew” Gregory’s
mission. We thought that she wanted to help him to succeed.
Before moving to her new house Libby had turned to religion
and involvement in fundamentalist beliefs to do so. Soon aer
Gregory installed the purple martin house, his wife erected
another “monument”, a religious one, next to it. Peter told Dr.
Pine a story that he had heard when he was growing up.
Apparently Libby and Gregory were visiting a man who had
also been a prisoner in a Philippine camp. Upon returning to
the United States this man withdrew from social life, lived in a
hut in the countryside and made religious statues. During their
visit to this man’s place Libby saw a life-size figure
representing Saint Joseph standing on a platform, the curve of
whi, as Peter knew from his ildhood, represented the front
part of a submarine. is man and Gregory had worked on
submarines before they were taken prisoner on the Bataan
Peninsula. Peter’s mother bought this statue and erected it, also
on a heavy concrete base, next to the purple martin house. In
fact, both “monuments” had stood next to ea other for
decades and were meticulously cared for and protected by both
parents.
 Gregory painted Saint Joseph’s eyes blue, like his own.
While reporting this, Peter realised that in his ildhood he had
openly thought of Gregory as saintly. For him, the Saint Joseph
statue on a “submarine” symbolised Gregory. Joseph wed Mary
and took care of lile Jesus, her ild. We surmised that,
likewise, Peter’s mother and Gregory perceived that they were
married so Gregory could save and protect lile Peter—who
also represented the helpless Gregory—by making the ild
Jesus-like, at least omnipotent. In order for Peter to remain
omnipotent, however, he would have to be given the tools to
express his aggression towards others so that no one would
make him a target of their aggression. In his day-to-day
activities Gregory was not an aggressive person, and as I stated
earlier, he and his wife were not involved in many social
activities. But Gregory had apparently managed to create an
image of himself in Peter’s mind as a hunter and an aggressive
strongman. Looking ba, Peter recalled how during his
developmental years this was the image he always carried of
Gregory.
e following story became available to us aer Dr. Pine and
Peter were able to focus on possible meanings of Gregory and
his mother’s “monuments”. It further illustrates Peter’s
anging aitude towards his treatment, his first steps in
recalling and sharing symbolically important events from his
past, and the development of his curiosity about their role in
his internal world. e event in this story took place when
Peter, still quite obese, entered adolescence and Gregory took
him hunting for the first time.
Erik Erikson (1950), Anna Freud (1965), Peter Blos (1967),
Martha Wolfenstein (1969), and other psyoanalysts have
studied the adolescence passage carefully. During this time
youngsters internally re-examine their ildhood psyosexual
development and ildhood object representations, discarding
some and anging others, and look for new ones. ey go
through a second individuation (Blos, 1967) and consolidate
their identity (Erikson, 1959). During Peter and Gregory’s first
hunting trip together in the woods they came upon a raccoon
drinking water from a stream, and Peter also drank from it.
When he reported this incident he did not recall if Gregory had
encouraged him to do so. He told Dr. Pine that some months
before this hunting trip he had studied the Bataan Death Mar
and had seen pictures of soldiers during the mar and in the
Japanese camps, and he was aware that they had to drink
water, clean or dirty, wherever they could find it. In fact, he
was secretly preoccupied with these pictures. e raccoon’s
eyes reminded him of the sunken eyes of the soldiers in the
pictures, although the animal was not so gaunt. When he drank
the water he was aware that, in his fantasy, he was identifying
with the raccoon, whi represented Gregory and the Japanese
prisons in the Bataan Death Mar. He had never shared this
fantasy with anyone before. Drinking the dirty water made
Peter very ill for some weeks, and the illness caused him to lose
fiy-five pounds—ten pounds less than Gregory had lost as a
prisoner.
Aer recovering from this illness, under Gregory’s direction,
Peter took up bodybuilding and aieved a well-developed
physique. roughout Peter’s illness, aer his recovery, and
while he was developing a strong body, he and Gregory never
talked about the older man’s Bataan experience. One day a
limousine arrived at Peter’s sool carrying a famous army
colonel who asked for Peter, glorifying him by singling him
out. e colonel offered Peter the opportunity to aend a
military academy. is encounter, a surprise to Peter, had been
arranged by Gregory and led to Peter enrolling as planned.
Now away from his home, Peter performed well
academically in his new sool and kept up his bodybuilding.
He distanced himself from his mother, but developed a ritual in
whi he and Gregory would hunt together in a conventional
manner two or three times a year. During su trips he would
adore Gregory and in turn Gregory would adore him,
refuelling his self-esteem. Peter crystallised his grandiose self,
and eventually became a military man. Now, during his
sessions, without anging the subject and without escaping to
grandiose preoccupations, he and Dr. Pine began to observe
that his “fat boy”, hungry self-representation was still with
him, split off from his grandiose self.
I told Dr. Pine that it was time to invite Peter to use the
cou. He did, and this time Peter agreed. During the
supervision hour just prior to Peter using the cou, I discussed
with Dr. Pine how it would be useful and perhaps necessary for
him to find a way to explain to Peter how they would now
work. We knew a great deal about Peter’s hungry self and Dr.
Pine agreed with me that his explaining to Peter how
psyoanalysis works—without using tenical terms—would
be good for therapeutic alliance. Dr. Pine told Peter to feel free
to say whatever came to his mind and report any bodily
sensation. Dr. Pine added that even when he was silent he
would continue to listen, and whenever he thought it would be
useful he would speak. Peter spoke about being in new
territory, but indicated that as a brave man he was ready to
meet this new allenge.
Peter’s transition from face-to-face meetings to a classical
psyoanalytic position may have gone smoothly, but the
impact of an external event would become intertwined with
the beginning of this new apter in Peter’s treatment, causing
it to be rather dramatic.
CHAPTER FOUR

Bla bears and taxidermy

P eter opened his second hour on the cou by saying he

was sleepy, but managed to tell Dr. Pine that before
coming to his session that morning he had been told that his
mother was ill and would be taken to a hospital. He talked
about how she was almost seventy years old and still had bla
hair. He was silent for a time and then reported that he was
thinking about bla bears. One bla bear he had shot had
been stuffed, and he was still searing for the right artificial
eyes to make it look like it was still alive. He spoke of the
aracter of bla bears and added that the behaviour of bears
is quite predictable as a rule, but the bla bear is
“sizophrenic” and aas without provocation. en he
reported once more that he was sleepy.
Dr. Pine noticed a connection between the mother with
bla hair and the unpredictable bla bear but, rightly,
decided it was not the time to verbalise this connection since
Peter seemed very disturbed about his mother’s illness.
Apparently her illness had stimulated fantasies and conflicts in
Peter, and it would be beer to wait and go along with Peter’s
pace, to be curious about these fantasies and conflicts. Peter
started listing all the good things about his mother, su as her
beauty and her ability to support her family even though she
was uneducated. Dr. Pine noted that his patient would not yet
tou upon aggressive feelings directed towards his mother’s
image and possible guilt that might be associated with su
feelings. Peter could only express his ambivalence about his
mother indirectly by recalling the bla bear he had shot and
describing his preoccupation with making it look alive.
Peter travelled to his mother’s town, also in the state of
Virginia, and visited the hospital where she was a patient.
During his next session he related that as soon as he had
entered the hospital lobby he had fainted and was taken to the
emergency room, where no reason for his “spell” could be
identified. Aer this unusual event he went to see his mother
who was feeling mu beer and would be disarged from
the hospital the next day. He was very puzzled by what had
happened. His analyst suggested that he try to verbalise
whatever thoughts and feelings he might have about the
incident. Peter’s first comments were: “I didn’t pass out in
Vietnam even when I was shot down! Why did I faint in a
hospital lobby?” Peter became tearful. During the first eleven
months of his treatment he would rather have been caught
dead than show tears to his analyst! Something within him,
most likely related to his mother’s illness, had drastically
anged him.
Peter recalled having been disciplined in elementary sool
by a woman teaer who told him to write “I will not behave
badly” 500 times, and his mother had wrien what was
required for him. He verbalised once more how his mother
cared for him, and he avoided focusing on how she had
intruded on his autonomy when she wrote the 500 sentences
instead of allowing the boy to do it himself. When Peter once
more became tearful, his analyst told him that he might have
mixed feelings about his mother doing his work for him and
added that having mix feelings about a person does not require
punishment. No one would ask him now to write “I will not
behave badly” 500 times. It would be beer, Dr. Pine said, to
examine causes for mixed feelings. Peter smiled very briefly
and le his session. at aernoon Dr. Pine and I discussed this
new development during our supervision hour and I told him I
appreciated his approa when his patient had taken off his
grandiose armament.
Aer learning that his mother was now well and had been
disarged from the hospital, without first informing Dr. Pine,
Peter himself underwent a physical examination and was
found to be fit. en he confessed that when he had gone to
visit his mother he had had a fantasy that she might die, and
then he had fainted. We learned that before his visit to the
hospital he had not seen his mother for seven years, even
though he had continued his ritual of meeting Gregory and
going hunting with him once or twice a year. Peter had no
difficulty travelling to Washington, D.C. or Rimond in
Virginia, or Alaska, or even India and other faraway places, but
apparently for seven years he had not found time to visit his
mother in a town not far from where he lived, until her illness.
Admiing this fact forced him to be curious about why he had
distanced himself from her.
e analyst suggested once more that Peter’s mother had
strongly encouraged her son’s dependence on her during his
ildhood and that she might accordingly be seen as a threat to
the independence he valued so highly. Dr. Pine added that this
thought had come to his mind and he wanted to share it with
Peter, but that if it did not make sense to him, he should not
accept what his analyst said. Dr. Pine was following my
suggestion that, in spite of Peter’s fainting in the hospital and
showing his tears to his analyst, we should not forget his
narcissistic personality organisation. Dr. Pine should explain
things in a way that did not aa Peter, but whi only
induced curiosity in him. Noting that Peter was listening to
him without a narcissistic outburst about being above su
considerations, Dr. Pine made a remark that more directly
focused on Peter: he said that Peter’s fainting spell might have
been a compromise between his wish to be independent of his
mother and his guilt that she might die. Peter continued to
listen aentively. Soon Peter brought his very first dream to a
session:
I was in my full bale gear, but was not allowed to
have my big guns with me; all I was allowed were my
pistols.
e analyst helped Peter to understand that his big guns
(Peter’s pumping up his grandiose self) were no longer
protecting him. He had fainted while going to see his mother,
and had let his analyst see his tears and learn about his fear of
bodily harm. Peter responded by talking about his experiences
in Vietnam, and began showing deep remorse for having killed
women and ildren. He appeared on the cou as if he was
beaten and in pain, as if he wanted to pull his hair out. is
was most unexpected, not only by Dr. Pine, also by me. Peter
giving up his “big guns”, and turning into a guilt-ridden kid
and a war veteran was happening too fast. No specific data
concerning the role of Gregory in him during his Vietnam
experiences surfaced.
Dr. Pine and I thought that Peter’s killing of Vietnamese
women was unconsciously connected with his death wish
against his “bad” mother/grandmother. When he killed
Vietnamese ildren these ildren represented lile Peter, who
was guilty of having a death wish against the two women and
in need of punishment. Sensing his death wish against the
mother/grandmother of his ildhood when he went to the
hospital, and his fainting there, had unexpectedly brought
Peter’s Vietnam experiences to the surface.
Here was an unusual dilemma: Should an analyst make an
explanation or interpretation su as the one I formulated
above about Peter’s condition—even if it had been at a time
when the patient was beer prepared to hear it? My stand is
that the analyst should not make su an explanation or
interpretation, because hearing su statements would remove
the patient’s wartime “superego permission” to kill people as
part of the reality of war. e removal of “superego
permission” would force the patient to feel that he had
commied murder. How can a person—not a psyopath—
tolerate being a murderer of another person or persons? Can a
psyoanalyst continue to analyse an actual murderer? Must a
psyoanalyst also need to agree that soldiers in war possess a
“war superego”? is is a topic about whi lile has been
wrien or discussed in psyoanalytic circles.
Dr. Pine and I decided to let Peter examine his aggressive
activities in Vietnam and sense his guilt feelings as mu as he
could without Dr. Pine connecting his killing of Vietnamese
women and ildren to murders commied by individuals with
a “civilian superego”, apart from balefields. Peter confessed
that while he was degrading Dr. Pine and advising him to see
the film Platoon to learn about what it was like to be in a war,
he himself was unable to wat this film. He could not face a
depiction of the brutality of war aer returning to his civilian
life.
Aer laboratory reports clearly showed that his mother’s life
was not in danger and news reaed Peter that she was now
ba at home fully recovered, he declared on the analyst’s
cou that, even armed with only pistols, he remained the
world’s best shot! is was an indication that aer allowing the
analyst to see his so side, his dependency, his rage against
those who caused this dependency, and his extreme guilt for
his murderous wishes and actions in Vietnam, he was ready
once more to use his grandiose self to deny what he had
examined. We knew however that the “memory” of this
examination would not completely disappear. As his analytic
process continued he would, in the future, once more look at
his hungry self and feel rage against those who caused it, but
without using his “big guns”. Later in this book, I will describe
how in the long run a patient like Peter needs to integrate both
his sides, his grandiose self and his hungry self—making grey
by mixing bla and white.
Peter, now in the middle of the second year of treatment,
declared that the cou was foreign territory for him. He
recalled his first deer hunt with experienced hunters and not
only with Gregory, I believe, as a symbolic explanation of his
first phase of treatment aer he started to use Dr. Pine’s cou
at a time when his mother’s illness had scared him and he had
temporarily given up his narcissistic defences. During this hunt
some experienced hunters scorned him as a novice because he
had limited equipment, until he killed six of the fourteen deer
they shot that day. He was so good! On the cou Peter once
more would not hear explanations. It was clear that, in spite of
the drastic events at the beginning of his lying on the cou,
and his tearful and painful responses to them, his narcissistic
resistances were ba and would persist, for a time at least.
Peter now perceived lying on the cou as a sign of being
dependent and/or castrated. He spoke of a hunting companion
who, having lost a leg (castrated) carried a spare prosthesis
with him. Peter was leing Dr. Pine know that he also had
spare “weapons”.
I noticed that Peter began using his weapons in two different
ways. First, he was actually using his guns, including his AK-
47. He started to go on more and more hunting trips, all of
whi seemed very costly as well as very deadly for the
animals, and sometimes Gregory would join him. He missed
some of his psyoanalytic sessions. On one trip he shot a bla
bear and brought a picture of the dead animal to show his
analyst. Dr. Pine responded by trying to tell Peter that the
hunting trips represented a wish to be with Gregory, the
idealisation of whom drew him out of the world of women
who bloed his individuation. e suggestion that the bla
bear might represent his mother proved to be premature. Peter
began to boast again of his association with the ri and
powerful and focused on his grand skills and deeds.
e second weapon that Peter began to use was a symbolic
psyological one. Having brought only one dream in a year
and a half, Peter began reporting five to six during ea
session. Sensing that the analyst was interested in hearing his
dreams, he was “generously” submiing to the analyst, but as I
told Dr. Pine, at the same time, by flooding his analyst with
dreams, Peter was psyologically shooting his pistol at him as
if dreams were bullets. It was also possible that by bombarding
his analyst with seemingly unending dream reports he was
trying to aieve his independence by himself, writing “I will
not behave badly” 500 times. I advised Dr. Pine not to waste his
time by focusing on the meanings of these dreams, but to focus
on the function of Peter flooding him with so many of them. In
any case Peter would not have time to provide any associations
since he had to report the manifest contents of five or six
dreams during ea session. What Peter was doing should be
interpreted as his new form of resistance.
At my suggestion, Dr. Pine told Peter how he was aware that
Peter liked to do everything in the best possible way. Bringing
so many dreams might be his way of providing material for the
best analytic work. However, it would be beer for them to
take their time, slowly examining and assimilating together the
meaning of Peter being on the cou. He told Peter that, on
another level, the surfeit of dreams he offered might represent
the surfeit of food Peter had been exposed to as a small ild,
and that he could grasp, by being overfed with dreams, how
lile Peter might have felt when being stuffed with food. He
anowledged that the analysis of dreams was useful, and even
necessary just as food is necessary, but that “too mu” made
something “good” into something “bad” and not assimilable.
is put a stop to the redundant reporting of dreams.
Peter was not on my cou. I suspect that I or any other
psyoanalyst might, or would, be perceived by Peter as
different from Dr. Pine, and we might or would respond in
different ways to anges in Peter aer he was reassured that
his mother would not die. While we did not have intellectual
disagreements in understanding Peter’s anged aitude aer
his mother was out of danger, I sensed that Dr. Pine was rather
frustrated and angry when Peter once more became aggressive
by slaughtering animals and shooting him with dreams. In one
supervisory hour, Dr. Pine reported that, to his surprise, he had
forgoen one session with Peter. He was seconds away from
leaving his office—a gesture that would have been like Peter’s
biological father shuing the door in his son’s face—when
Peter arrived. e analyst conducted his work without
mentioning this lapse, whi he reported at our next
supervisory session.
I suggested that Dr. Pine speak of this to his own analyst,
with whom he was still working. Aer doing this he told me
about early ildhood losses of his own, whi included the
death of his mother when he was an infant, abandonment by
his biological father, and that he had been taken care of by a
grandmother. A mother who stuffs her ild with food and
intrudes into his autonomy is also an “absent mother”. Hearing
his patient’s early experiences, including his biological father’s
rejection, had induced anxieties in Dr. Pine that were linked to
his own ildhood. ese were conflicts that, according to him,
he had nearly worked through in his new analysis with my
former mentor, and they provoked a desire to turn away from
Peter to avoid recalling his own early experiences. I thanked
Dr. Pine for sharing this personal information with me. He
added that working with Peter was difficult even with my help,
but also very useful towards assimilating and mastering his
own similar ildhood traumas that had arisen in his own
analysis. He was determined to continue to work with Peter
and me. Even though I would never know the details of Dr.
Pine’s internal world, I was amazed at the similarities between
his and Peter’s ildhood history. Dr. Pine’s wife had le him
and this eventually made him seek a second analysis. Peter’s
wife only threatened to leave him and this had led to Peter’s
seeking treatment. I was commied to remain as Dr. Pine’s
supervisor and, behind the scenes, continue to help Peter.
Aer he stopped maine-gunning Dr. Pine with dreams
Peter cancelled two sessions and went to a taxidermists’
convention, drank a great deal, and resumed his bulimic habits.
According to the agreement between the analyst and the
patient, the laer was responsible for paying for missed
sessions unless the analyst could fill the session by seeing
another patient. Dr. Pine could not fill most sessions Peter
missed, and Peter paid for them. Although Peter was a very
ri man, when he started his treatment Dr. Pine decided not to
arge him a higher than normal fee. When I learned this I told
Dr. Pine that I would have done the same to avoid puing
myself in a position of doing something special for the person.
I would be the same person offering psyoanalysis with my
standard fee for everyone lying on my cou.
Peter had become overtly symptomatic, and when he
returned to his analyst, sober, he reported what had taken
place, saying, “I want to be alone now.” Aer staying silent he
commented at the end of the session that the analyst was the
only person ever to have seen him helpless and weeping as an
adult. Dr. Pine made empathic sounds. Once more Peter gave
up his defences, whi had been exhibited with grandiosity,
and he began to show himself to Dr. Pine as a wounded ild.
Dr. Pine reassured me that he would be able to listen to and
work with Peter. He felt he could now more clearly separate
his traumatised ildhood images and rejecting objects from
su images Peter was presenting, because of his own
deepening analytic work and the fact that he was no longer
keeping his own ildhood traumas a secret from me.
Peter told his analyst that he was making plans to build an
addition to his house. He would build a great hall and move
the hunting trophies from his special room to this bigger place
that had space for future trophies. Soon workers began
building this hall. e second part of the second year of Peter’s
analytic work enabled both the analyst and the patient—and
the supervisor—to uncover and assimilate multiple meanings
associated with Peter’s preoccupation with this hall, whi was
eventually built to house his hunting trophies and
accommodate his taxidermy hobby. Instead of relating details
of sessions and how these meanings slowly emerged, I will
illustrate a psyoanalytic concept, the principle of multiple
functioning (Waelder, 1936), by listing multiple meanings of his
preoccupation:
1. e stuffed animals, especially the deer, represented the
patient himself, who as a ild had been stuffed by his
mother and grandmother while his soul was being killed
(Shengold, 1989).
2. e stuffed animals also represented Peter’s mother,
grandmother, and biological father. He felt that his mother
and the “wit” (his grandmother) intruded into the
development of his autonomy and individuation. His thrill-
seeking was associated with the anxiety and excitement of
knoing on the door of his biological father’s house. When
he had done so, his father rejected and humiliated him. In a
symbolic replaying of this event and “memories” of his
being rejected by the two women, he could kill his
biological father (usually represented by cobras) and his
mother/grandmother (usually represented by bla bears),
and avenge himself. By keeping stuffed cobras and bla
bears at his home he could control them.
3. Besides being a traumatised ild, Peter’s self-representation
was also a reservoir for Gregory’s self-image that had been
traumatised in the Philippines. In his trophy room Peter
would bring to life Gregory’s image that he carried within
him. He spent hours in this room surrounded by dead
creatures, just as Gregory had spent months in prison camps
where people died every day and where sometimes he had
to bury and re-bury corpses. Once, during a hunting trip,
Peter had heard Gregory telling the other hunters that he
had had to bury and re-bury corpses.
4. e trophy room was also a psyological replica of
Gregory’s multi-storied, purple martin birdhouse. Peter was
obsessed with making the stuffed animals look alive. He
spent a great deal of money finding artificial eyes or teeth
that looked exactly like natural ones. He felt he should be
able to bring the dead to life, and have control over who
dies and who lives. He would deal with Gregory’s “survival
guilt” (Niederland, 1968) stemming from experiences in the
Philippines, as well as his own aer leaving Vietnam.
5. Peter had a habit of touing the hides of his trophies again
and again, aer whi he would it. Obsessive touing of
one’s own skin and/or the skin of another is done to create a
physical/psyological border between one person and the
other, thereby maintaining individuation separate from the
other, and on a higher level, between dead people and those
who survive a bale.
6. Peter also used his trophy room as his “island empire”,
where he was in control of death and life, and where no one
could be a threat to his grandiose self.
When he was especially focusing on one stuffed animal
representing lile Peter—whi was most of the second part of
the second year of his analysis—Peter became hypoondriacal,
going from one doctor to another. He decided that he had
cancer, and told his analyst that this terrified him. Dr. Pine, at
my suggestion, told Peter that his concern with bodily harm
might be a maer of recalling his ildhood trauma when food
had been pushed into him—“cancer” in his mind being a
current version of this invasion. Dr. Pine did this, but I sensed
that he could not do it with conviction. He told me, and Peter
as well, that he had no way of knowing whether or not Peter’s
fear of cancer was justified. Peter’s cancer phobia lasted for
months and I had to be careful with Dr. Pine while he was
trying to help his patient to give up this symptom.
Peter found his own way to get rid of his cancer phobia
when he urged the aging Gregory to join him for hunting trips.
In a sense he wanted to recreate what had happened to him in
his ildhood, especially when he reaed puberty, and to seek
and find a “saviour” to pull him out of the psyological grip of
his mother and grandmother. I must add that Peter’s perception
of Gregory as an idealised object that would deal with the
hungry self was the main issue, not his seeing Gregory as an
oedipal father who would play a role in Peter’s move up to deal
with oedipal issues. Gregory was no longer a young man and
did not want to go on hunting trips. Peter insisted and once
almost begged Gregory on the phone to join him for a short
hunting trip; he called because, aer his mother was declared
healthy, Peter had stopped visiting the town where his mother
lived and stopped seeing her. Gregory came along, but Peter
could not help but notice that he was no longer a good hunter.
is was a big disappointment for him.
I instructed Dr. Pine to tell Peter that the security of his
identity did not depend on his keeping Gregory as a “saviour”,
and that there were other ways for Peter to maintain his self-
esteem. Dr. Pine, with my encouragement, also told Peter that,
as far he was concerned, there was nothing more important
than Peter’s analytic sessions. He suggested that instead of
being preoccupied with hunting with Gregory, and missing
sessions, Peter could start, with his analyst, to consider other
ways to find himself without worries of cancer, or without
doing the opposite, su as when he considered himself above
being hurt.
A month later, at the beginning of the third year of his
treatment, Peter began to fall asleep lying on the
psyoanalytic cou, anywhere from a short time to the full
fiy minutes of his sessions. is continued for a year. In the
next apter I will tell the stories of what Peter oen called his
“empty sleep” and its multiple meanings, and his aempts
toward “crucial juncture” experiences.
CHAPTER FIVE

“Empty sleep”, therapeutic regression,

and “crucial juncture” experiences

P eter experienced sleepy feelings on the cou when he

heard that his mother was ill and would be taken to a
hospital. Aer he realised that aging Gregory could no longer
remain the model of a strong hunter and he heard that
Congress was discussing cuts in the defence budget, Peter had
his first episode of actually sleeping on the cou. If defence
cuts were approved, the company with whi Peter was
associated would sell fewer weapons. Changing world politics
aer the end of the Cold War, like the aging Gregory, would
not support his place as “number one.” He said, “It is about
time to give up our defences,” and promptly fell asleep. Most
likely he was referring to the United States’ military defences,
but the analyst understood Peter’s words as a surrender of
narcissistic defences as well. e analyst was tempted to
intrude and wake Peter up, but he remained silent. Aer fieen
minutes, when the end of the session arrived, he made noises
to awaken his patient, who, showing no surprise, took his
leave.
Peter’s episodes of sleeping on the psyoanalytic cou
continued. Sometimes he would sleep for ten to twenty
minutes and at other times he would be completely lost to
sleep for nearly the duration of his psyoanalytic session,
breathing deeply and even snoring. Su sleeping episodes,
short and long ones, became rather routine in the third year of
his treatment. During the first months of his falling asleep on
the cou the patient declared that while he was sleeping he
was “empty” and named his initial sleeping episodes “empty
sleep”. During these months he could not describe any images
or dreams upon awakening. e analyst, with my approval, did
not interfere with Peter’s new “habit”, except by raising
curiosity about it at appropriate times.
 A few years before Dr. Pine observed Peter’s “empty sleep”,
Steven Levy wrote about how feelings of emptiness are
common complaints among patients seeking psyoanalytic
treatment, especially among patients with borderline,
narcissistic, and depressive pathology. He stated that at times
feelings of emptiness come to dominate the patient’s “self-
experience and lead to difficulties in the process of treatment”
(Levy, 1984, p. 387). He also explained that emptiness as a
mental state differs from patient to patient, regarding how it
feels, as well as in regards to its particular dynamic meaning. I
can add that a patient may experience emptiness differently at
different times and this emptiness may have different meanings
at different times. I will illustrate how the meaning of Peter’s
experience of his “empty sleep” anged as his analysis
proceeded during the third year of his treatment and
eventually evolved to represent his therapeutic regression in
the service of progression.

Emptiness is a subjective mental state aracterised by a

sense of impoverishment of inner feelings, fantasies, and
wishes, as well as by a la of response to external stimuli.
Convictions, enthusiasm, and relatedness to others all seem lost
and are replaced by feelings of deadness, boredom, and
superficiality. Earlier in his treatment, when Peter would take
refuge in his “island empire” he did not experience emptiness.
He was filled with a sense of superiority and had intense object
relations by psyologically wating people and things
outside his “empire” and having fantasies about them. When he
was in his “empty sleep” obviously his brain cells continued to
work, but before falling asleep and aer awakening he
described his sleeping episodes as representing his mental state
of emptiness.
It seemed to me that Peter’s taking refuge in “empty sleep”
reflected his surrender of narcissistic defences and was a covert
complaint against his idealised object turning into an
unsatisfactory one—aging Gregory no longer providing self-
esteem for him or the US government giving him less money.
To be “unloved” completely would induce terrifying affects,
and being in an “empty sleep” would help him circumvent
experiencing su affects. By feeling and saying he was
“empty” Peter was also indirectly asking to be filled up. By this
time in his treatment, for practical purposes, Peter had given
up his symptoms of bulimia and heavy drinking. Yet, I was not
sure that he was truly prepared to be filled up by his analyst’s
“love” without turning it into “bad food”. Peter was still
experiencing the analyst as his araic objects that would or
could not provide him libidinal satisfaction. In the external
world Gregory was his idealised object, but this idealisation
was now threatened. However, the analyst could not replace
Gregory. My belief was that Peter needed more experience to
maintain the analyst’s image as a “new” and “developmental”
object with whi he could identify, and thus develop new
internal structures, while the analyst would also continue to
function as a transference figure.
In 1934 James Straey described the concept “auxiliary
superego”. e analyst becomes an “auxiliary superego” for the
patient and the laer, through identification with the analyst as
an “auxiliary superego”, anges his own severe superego.
Following Straey, in 1956 Paula Heimann described how an
analyst mainly evolves as an “auxiliary ego”. As time went on
in the psyoanalytic literature, the old terms “auxiliary
superego” and “auxiliary ego” were replaced by new terms su
as “new object”. “analytic introject” or “developmental object”
(Loewald, 1960; Cameron, 1961; Giovacini, 1972; Kernberg,
1975; Volkan, 1976, 2010; Tähkä, 1993; Volkan & Ast, 1994). e
analyst’s “newness” does not refer to her social existence in the
real world, but depends on the analyst being an object image
not hitherto encountered by the patient. e interaction with
the “new object” is akin to a nurturing mother-ild
relationship (Rapaport, 1951; Ekstein, 1966).
I had told Dr. Pine to listen to his patient’s silences. During
his supervision sessions with me he kept making
intellectualised explanations for Peter’s new behaviour paern
on the cou by comparing it with what is described in the
psyoanalytic literature as anal narcissism. (Shengold, 1985).
He could not show mu empathy for Peter’s underlying hurts.
I was concerned with Dr. Pine’s possible negative counter-
response to his patient because, during his supervisory sessions
with me, he seemed to be rather angry at Peter. Dr. Pine
confided in me that in his personal life he was facing some new
losses, and that working with Peter had reactivated his
ildhood feelings concerning sensitivity to loss. He also told
me that he was trying hard with the help of my former mentor
to work through his difficulties.
Nevertheless, one day Dr. Pine “accidentally” loed the door
of his office and failed to hear and respond to Peter’s kno
when his patient came for one of his psyoanalytic hours.
Peter le. e analyst then realised what had happened, and
saw how his own and Peter’s ildhood trauma of being
rejected by their biological fathers during their ildhood had
been played out: he had not permied Peter to enter his house!
He called Peter to arrange for the lost session, and when Peter
came he slept on Dr. Pine’s cou throughout the hour without
saying anything.
When Dr. Pine discussed with me what had happened I
remained respectful about his situation and advised him to
focus on the progressive aspect of the incident. I was against
the idea of Dr. Pine apologising and sharing his own
reawakened ildhood conflict with his patient. To do so would
burden his patient; instead he should tell him how their work
together had led to Peter’s humiliation at the hand of his
biological father being brought to life between him and his
analyst. Both of them now could “tou” this ildhood
experience since it had been reenacted between them. Dr. Pine
“loing the door” on Peter now could be an opportunity for
both of them to feel clearly and talk about Peter’s ildhood
hurts.
Dr. Pine was able to make statements, as I suggested, as soon
as Peter was on the cou during their next meeting. Instead of
acting the role of an “old object”, making these statements
increased his ance to evolve further as a “new object.” Tears
came to Peter’s eyes and Dr. Pine told me that tears also came
to his, although his patient on the cou did not know this. Dr.
Pine further separated his own ildhood experiences from that
of his patient and he was able to establish empathic contact
with Peter.
Peter described the plot of the film Rain Man, whi he had
recently seen. Rain Man is a 1988 film directed by Barry
Levinson. e two brothers were portrayed by Tom Cruise and
Dustin Hoffman. When I was writing this book I was amused
to note that Rain Man won the “Golden Bear” award at the
39th Berlin Film Festival and not a “Bla Bear” award! It
featured two brothers, one a selfish young man and one an
autistic savant. eir estranged father had kept the existence of
his autistic son from the brother, a self-centred yuppie. When
the father dies the selfish son discovers that the father’s
multimillion-dollar estate will go to the brother he never knew
he had. He finds his autistic brother and together they
experience a cross-country journey, whi evolves into a deep
relationship between the two. Peter’s associations on the cou
to this film focused on his willingness to take a new journey
with his analyst. He would return to Rain Man and make
further associations to it months later.
Peter continued to sleep on the cou, but now his sleeping
mind was no longer “empty”. One day aer sleeping deeply on
the cou for twenty minutes or so he spontaneously woke up
and said: “I saw that naked woman again”. Now, in the third
year of his treatment, Peter told of having had since his
adolescence a recurring dream of a naked woman standing in a
bathroom beoning to him. He would enter the bathroom, but
they did not tou one another. is woman was too available;
seductive, but cold; overprotective, but destructive.
He recalled his first sexual experience, whi had taken
place with a waitress whom he had then taken pains never to
see again. As a young man, any loving experience for him had
to be a maer of “hit and run”, since a woman who loved
would smother, and he expected that were he to be loved, he
would be hurt. We learned that he had married Patsy because
he saw her as an external superego—not a harsh one—whi he
could use to keep his aggressive and sexual impulses in e,
but in the long run their relationship, at least on the surface,
became meanical.
Peter was able to consider that the naked woman appearing
in the recurring dreams that began in his adolescent days
might represent his mother, and Dr. Pine wondered if Peter
would now bring oedipal material to his sessions. I reminded
Dr. Pine of a concept called “reaing up”, first described by
Bryce Boyer (1983, 1999) as a defence meanism. “Reaing
up” refers to a patient’s excessive preoccupation with a conflict,
its symbolic expressions, and its defences, and is associated
with a particular level of ildhood development that aims to
escape a more anxiety-provoking conflict belonging to a lower-
level ildhood development. For example, a patient’s dramatic
preoccupation with oedipal issues can be in the service of
covering up a more hurtful pre-oedipal issue. Persons with
narcissistic personality organisation (as well those with
borderline personality organisation) sometimes defensively
escape to oedipal-sounding issues in order to get away from
their difficulty in doing work on mending their grandiose areas
with their hungry areas—their libidinally soaked self- and
object images with aggressively soaked self- and object images.
People with borderline personality organisation cannot
integrate opposing self- and object images, and the affective
states associated with them. Unlike individuals with
narcissistic personality organisation they do not have lasting or
stable grandiose selves. Sometimes they also utilise “reaing
up”.
My suggestion to Dr. Pine was to stay with Peter’s struggle
with his unintegrated mental representations of women he was
involved with sexually as a young man—his need to escape
from them aer being intimate with them—and not to dwell on
oedipal issues. I advised, “Just wait and let us see what will
develop.”
Melanie Klein (1946) named ildren’s experience of
bringing together their opposite self- and object images so that
they can begin to mend their internal worlds “crucial juncture”.
She wrote:
e synthesis between the loved and hated aspects of
the complete object gives rise to the feelings of
mourning and guilt whi imply vital advances in the
infant’s emotional and intellectual life. is is also a
crucial juncture for the oice of neurosis or psyosis.
(p. 100)
Today some of us use the same term when referring to
mending exercises of adult patients whose internal worlds are
not integrated. Kernberg (1970) stated that the pathological
narcissistic self-structure (the grandiose self) is resolved in
analysis when the patient becomes aware that his ideal concept
is basically a fantasy structure. He wrote that “the deep
admiration and love for the ideal mother” and “the hatred for
the distorted dangerous mother” meet in the transference and,
at this crucial point, the patient may experience depression and
suicidal thoughts “because he has mistreated the analyst and
all the significant persons in his life, and he may feel that he
has actually destroyed those whom he could have loved and
who might have loved him” (p. 81).
My experiences show that when a patient in analysis is
prepared through analytic work to go through crucial juncture
experiences, she does not experience depression or suicidal
thoughts. I have wrien detailed descriptions of adults going
through “crucial juncture” experiences (Volkan, 1974, 1976,
1987, 1993, 1995, 2010).
When we analyse patients with neurotic personality
organisation—individuals in whose internal world self- and
object images are integrated and who can experience
ambivalence instead of separating self- and object images by
defensive spliing—the analytic work takes us towards the
resolution of oedipal conflicts even though usually we first
need to deal with some, or many, pre-oedipal conflicts. When
we analyse persons with narcissistic personality organisation
(or borderline personality organisation) the initial main
direction of the analytic work aims to help patients mend the
opposite images in their internal world. Only aer patients
accomplish su mending will they be capable of genuinely
working through the oedipal issues.
I discussed with Dr. Pine that without first allowing a patient
like Peter who has a narcissistic personality organisation to
have “crucial juncture” experiences, any focus on his oedipal
conflicts would be a wild-goose ase. Some analysts feel that
if patients who possess internal split self- and object images
regress further, they may become psyotic. ese analysts
utilise suggestions, clarifications, limit-seing and
interpretations that aim to reduce patients’ anxiety. e
repeated experiences with the analyst’s gentle but steady
confrontations with the spliing may provide new “ego
experiences” within the therapeutic seing, whi may help
patients mend some of their divided parts.
My view holds that su patients need to experience further
regression—a therapeutic one—in order to firmly ange their
internal structures. A patient’s therapeutic regression, like
Peter’s, occurs aer years of analytic work when the patient
has had enough experience with the analyst as “new object”,
and also when the analyst can regresses “in the service of the
other” (Olini, 1964, 1980) in order “to meet” the patient at a
regressed level. Hence, the analyst, at the appropriate time,
should not interfere with the patient’s regression to a level
lower than the defensively split level already exhibited.
Accordingly, aer regressing so low in a therapeutic seing,
the adult patient will progress through healthier developmental
avenues towards psyic growth, mu as ildren, when in a
suitable environment, accomplish the development of an
integrated self-representation, and are able to experience their
internal and external object images as also mended.
Dr. Pine mostly remained silent or made remarks indicating
that he was listening to Peter and waiting to see what would
develop. Sure enough, Peter brought a dream that even in its
manifest content illustrated how his mind was on mending the
opposites:
 I was working on a turkey to be mounted [by
taxidermy] but, I realised that the turkey had two
halves. I wanted to join them, but I couldn’t.
Now Peter was able to discuss with his analyst his struggle
with mending opposite images and his desire to rea a crucial
juncture. Peter once more, without first telling Dr. Pine,
consulted a physician. Associations to this event brought to the
surface Peter’s fantasy that the physician he had contacted
would put his body together. He was looking for a bodily cure
for his psyological split within himself. Peter returned to give
further associations to Rain Man. He wanted to put two
brothers in one body and turn them into one single person. He
fell asleep on the cou and dreamed of a large missile that in
actuality he had been trying to sell. He confessed that he
wanted to go ba to his grandiose “missile defence”. He stated
that this time he would not try to escape and would aempt to
further understand his split images, especially the way he
needed to talk about how great his mother was while
continuing to avoid her. He said that when he worked through
this he would also have a different relationship with Patsy and
feel closer to his ildren.
During Peter’s next session he fell asleep on the cou once
more and when he woke up he reported a new dream:
“I saw a writing that said ‘King Tut’.”
Peter knew something about this king, but aer the session
when he went home he found a book and read about King Tut
—Tutankhamen. e next day he told Dr. Pine that King Tut
became a king at the age of nine or ten and then married his
half-sister. He indicated that most likely he had known this
before reading the book. He spoke of his identification with
King Tut. He had been stu with his mother and grandmother
when he was nine or ten years old, as King Tut was married to
his half-sister at the same age; in a sense he was “married” to
his mother and grandmother (not with sexual fantasies, but
more with aggressive fantasies as expressed when he referred
to his grandmother as a “wit”). He now knew more about
how he used Gregory as a male figure to tea him “freedom”
from these women. He recalled that soon aer Gregory
appeared in his life Peter taught himself to ride a bicycle. He
now perceived this event—a symbol of his self-reliance—as the
core of his future narcissistic personality organisation, whi
was to receive more direct support when he came to puberty
and Gregory made him a “hunter”, a “number one” person, a
king.
He now declared that his appearance as “number one” was
like having a gold death mask like King Tut’s. Interestingly, in
the book he read he saw a picture of King Tut’s gold death
mask, a cobra and vulture on its headdress. He declared that
King Tut was dead. Peter himself could not remain as “number
one”. is was the first time that, indirectly, Peter spoke about
the possibility of having “average” qualities like everyone else.
He continued to sleep on the cou on and off during the
laer part of the third year of his treatment, but with a major
difference: his new experiences were not reflections of his
defensive regression, his being lonely and empty, that had
induced negative counter-feelings in his analyst. is time he
was a comfortably sleeping baby trying to experience a new
babyhood during his sessions. He would curl up like a small
ild on the cou and feel secure. Peter experienced and
illustrated his therapeutic regression with his bodily gestures.
Dr. Pine managed not to interfere with it, and once he clearly
understood what his patient was doing, he even felt envious of
his patient without doing or saying anything to hurt Peter.
CHAPTER SIX

Operation Desert Storm, sinking a

psyological submarine, and the
inability to shoot a bla bear

O n 2 August 1990 Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded

Kuwait. On 17 January 1991 a United Nations-
authorised coalition force, led by the United States, initiated a
war known as “Operation Desert Storm” with an aerial
bombardment whose mission was to expel Iraqis from Kuwait.
On 24 February a ground assault began, and the war ended a
short time later on 28 February 1991 when Kuwait was
liberated.
As things were heating up in the Gulf region, the company
with whi Peter was associated prospered, and Peter found
himself involved in moving weapons of mass destruction. His
habit of sleeping on the cou disappeared. More aware than
the average person of the destructive potential of the weapons
he was dealing, he seemed very excited by their power. He
came to his sessions but, on the surface, his investment in
understanding his internal world now appeared trivial in
comparison to what he talked about: his interactions with
important individuals and especially his own importance. He
would sometimes name the weapons he was dealing with and
other times he would say that they were secret weapons. In
any case, he was sure that an ordinary person like his analyst
would not understand the superior things he was involved in.
In the midst of his excitement and increased activities,
unexpectedly one of the senior people in the company he was
associated with—an extension of Peter’s grandiose self—
underwent heart surgery, and another person, one of the most
powerful people in the US weapons industry, dropped dead.
ese events interfered with his bragging about himself. Peter
became nervous and needed to experience another “aggressive
triumph”, su as going on a big trip to hunt tigers in India. He
then gave up this plan in favour of going on a conventional
hunting trip in the United States with Gregory. He needed once
more to have his grandiose self filled by the older man.
Gregory complied, but during the trip he complained of
shoulder pain, leaving Peter no oice but to face the fact that
the older man was no longer a giant. When Peter returned
home he noted that the younger of his twins had taken his car
to go to a social event in a nearby town and returned home
with an “empty tank”. is made Peter so mad that he could
not even sit at the dining room table with the twins, and he
was especially enraged at the one who had forced him to
notice his “hungry self”, as it appeared in the image of his car
with an empty tank.
e reader will note the reappearance of Peter’s old and very
familiar psyological behaviour paerns: his waving his
grandiose self as if it were a flag so that others could see his
power, protecting his grandiose self with aggressive acts,
searing for idealised objects that confirmed and supported
his grandiose self, while experiencing rage and anxiety due to
intrusions of symbols or reminders of his hungry self. Even
though Peter had recently experienced a dramatic therapeutic
regression, the reality that a new war would soon take place
seemed to trigger symtoms arising from the impact of previous
wars on Peter and the image of Gregory within him. e
reader may ask, as Dr. Pine asked me, if all the therapeutic
work over the previous three years had been for nothing. My
answer to Dr. Pine was “No”. Even though on the surface Peter
appeared almost exactly like he had been when he first came to
see Dr. Pine, I expected to notice major differences in him; this
was due to my own psyoanalytic work with individuals with
narcissistic personality organisation.
When people with narcissistic personality organisation go
through a therapeutic regression, it does not mean that they
will get well right away when they begin moving upward.
Intense involvement with an analyst during a therapeutic
regression prepares patients to develop a stronger working
alliance with the analyst and a more functional “observing
ego”. Aer a therapeutic regression, when patients repeat old
symptoms and/or visit disruptive aracter paerns, they also
wonder where these symptoms and paerns come from. ey
pour out ildhood memories, whi initiate affective
discussions of genetic determinants of what is going on here
and now between themselves and their analysts, and they
begin making internal anges to tame their symptoms and
aracter traits. Patients’ dreams especially provide
psyological evidence about su anges. e examination of
dreams makes more visible the bringing of the grandiose self
side by side with the hungry one, aempts to integrate them,
and a move up to a higher-level personality organisation.
Before the start of Operation Desert Storm, but when US
troops were preparing to go to Saudi Arabia, Peter told his
analyst of a dream:
I was assigned to a Cobra helicopter in Saudi Arabia.
Iraq aaed and I tried to take off, but awakened.
I reminded Dr. Pine that at the beginning of his treatment Peter
would not have had a dream like this; or if he did have one he
would immediately deny or even repress it. Even though
spliing is a primary defence meanism for individuals with
narcissistic personality organisation, they also utilise
repression. e more stable their grandiose self, the more
ability they have to use repression. Peter certainly would not
share su a dream with an “inferior” psyiatrist. Dr. Pine
started laughing and relaxed. Aer all the work he had done
with Peter, all was not lost!
Next, Peter more openly wanted Dr. Pine to know that his
patient could no longer hold on to his grandiosity. He brought
another dream:
I was in a war zone. But, I suddenly realised that
instead of being in arge of fantastic missiles, I only
had bows and arrows.
I suspect that Peter’s image of bows and arrows not only
referred to times far ba in history, but also to his own
regression. Peter began giving associations to his “bows and
arrows” dream, not like a veteran of the Vietnam War, but as a
“veteran” of psyoanalytic work. His fear of only having bows
and arrows reminded him of his ildhood nightmares. ese
he no longer denied, or now they were unrepressed. In his
nightmares he was lost in caverns. In some caverns he saw two
bla women and a lile snake that became a fat snake.
Without any comment from the analyst, Peter knew that the
two bla women stood for his ildhood mother and
grandmother; both had long bla hair. e lile snake that
became fat represented him. Aer giving these associations,
Peter said: “I know now how my current angry feelings, for
example feelings I had when my daughter forgot to fill up my
car’s tank with gas, and my excitement about a new war, are
connected with my ildhood feelings. When I was a ild I
was so dependent and so angry! I had my own internal war.”
He then slept for twenty minutes. is would be Peter’s very
last sleeping episode on Dr. Pine’s cou.
Peter continued to make references to the impending war in
the Persian Gulf while also exploring his ildhood. He would
go from being omnipotent to being weak and then omnipotent
again. I thought of him like a seamstress sewing together two
pieces of cloth, one piece full of aggressive designs and the
other one exhibiting symbols of dependency.
Everyone at the time saw the war unfold live on television. I
too wated incredible destruction caused by retreating Iraqi
soldiers, especially the burning of the oil fields. I witnessed the
results of unbelievable US tenology used for war as if I were
wating a computer game on the television screen. Peter also
wated the war on the television and then had dreams of
bodies that had been blown apart in Vietnam. He once more
showed guilt and remorse. Feelings of remorse and grief were
very good signs of his progress. But then he would have other
dreams expressing aggression and power. He began linking his
sadism with anal elements. He dreamed of bathrooms where
torture occurred. He had no recollection of his toilet training,
but felt that it might have involved intrusion by his mother
and grandmother. I learned that he had a dog. He took his dog
to a shooting range, where the noise burst the animal’s
eardrums. At the time he indicated no feeling of remorse for
this.
From the beginning of Operation Desert Storm Peter
witnessed on television body bags shipped to Kuwait. He knew
that the weapons he supplied would bring death and
destruction; his ildhood fantasies of the potential of his
omnipotent sadism were coming true. Now he was going
through a hard time trying to further understand his ildhood
dependency on the two intrusive women of his early years
while experiencing aggressive feelings toward them. is
caused Dr. Pine to once more lo Peter out of his office, aer
whi he arged him for the missed session. Dr. Pine realised
that Peter talking, with affect, about his ildhood traumas had
led the doctor to respond with what he called “another
parapraxis”, like another Freudian “slip of tongue”. I sensed
that Dr. Pine was embarrassed and was trying to minimise the
story of loing the door of his office and not leing his patient
come in. Once more Dr. Pine presented what had happened to
his patient as an opportunity to very closely discuss Peter’s
ildhood environment. I was pleased to note that Peter went
along with this and soon anowledged that for a long time in
his treatment he had, off and on, linked his analyst’s image to
his biological father whose “badness” he was now questioning.
Peter began wondering if his mother had rejected his biological
father, whose consequent rage might have been misplaced onto
their son and led to Peter’s own humiliation. He began
thinking that people are not “all bad” or “all good” and that he
had idealised his stepfather and used his zeal for hunting to
avoid anowledgement of ildhood rage against both
biological parents. As far as I remember, Peter never tried to
find out where his biological father was and what he was
doing. I have no information about this in my supervision
notes.
Peter became aware that his narcissistic personality
organisation had come about in defensive adaptation to
ildhood hurts, but it could be maintained only by repeated
“refuelling” with an idealised object, whi in Peter’s case was
Gregory’s representation. He confessed that for decades he had
experienced repeating dreams and even fantasies of walking on
water. He knew that he was someone special, someone like
Jesus who could walk on water while God’s ordinary human
beings could not. He was keeping this as a “secret” to himself,
not because he was embarrassed to talk about it but because
ordinary people would not understand.
One night he once more walked on water in a dream. e
next evening when the dream reappeared he noticed that his
walking on water was only an illusion. In this dream there was
a submarine just beneath the water and this was what he had
been walking on. People looking at him from the shore,
however, believed that he was walking on water; Peter was
fooling the onlookers. He felt confused about this in his dream
and woke up perspiring. e submarine holding Peter on the
water represented Gregory who had worked on submarines
before the Bataan Death Mar and whose image Peter had
used in order to be like Jesus. In Gregory and Libby’s garden
Saint Joseph/Gregory was also on a submarine, standing up.
But this was also an illusion to help Gregory deny and/or
repress his life as a prisoner in the Philippines.
On the third night Peter had his final submarine dream:
I was once more walking on a submarine. It dove, and I
fell into water. I started swimming toward the shore
and then woke up.
ere was no reason for Dr. Pine to make an interpretation.
e patient and the analyst wondered what Peter would find
on the shore when he reaed it. What he found on the shore
became obvious to both the patient and the analyst—and also
to me—when Peter disclosed, at first reluctantly, that although
he had been a dare-devil pilot, he had always had a fear of
flying, and that, while hunting dangerous game, he had also
been afraid. He integrated his opposing sides more when he
reaed the shore and accepted that “averageness” was also a
condition included in him.
 A drastic ange took place when Peter went on a hunting
trip with a few other hunters. Peter encountered a bla bear
and surprised himself when he could not shoot the animal.
Only later would he think about this and recall discussions on
the cou about a bla bear symbolising his mother. e first
Gulf War had been over for some months now, guns were
silent, and Peter on the cou was busy silencing his guns as
well as his sadism. Now he was talking about his wife and
ildren in a loving manner, and Dr. Pine and I sensed that his
relationship with his family was also anging.
He talked about sometimes wishing that he had a son. In the
past he would imagine having a son and then teaing him
how to hunt like Gregory had taught him. He realised that he
wanted to pass the task of having “aggressive triumphs” onto
his imagined son. Around this time we learned that his older
daughter was studying to be a biologist that provided her a
position in the field of environmental protection. Peter sensed
that, aer all, he had passed something to the next generation.
His daughter would ange the function of his sadism against
animals and do the opposite: be a healer of nature, including
animals.
e new hall had been finished and Peter’s hunting trophies
were mounted there. As he understood the working of his
internal world, he no longer had need of “aggressive triumphs”,
and his interest in hunting started to fade. He no longer
wanted to go to this special hall and be alone with the stuffed
animals. Like the submarine, his “island empire” had sunk. We
learned that his wife’s hobby had been to knit flowers, make
pillow cases, and also actually raise flowers. One evening Peter,
now in his early fiies, made love to Patsy and noted how
mu both of them enjoyed being together. e next day,
perhaps as a reflection of his old grandiosity, he made an
unusual and drastic decision: to get rid of his hunting trophies
and give up his preoccupation with taxidermy. He would hire
people to put a big window in the hall where his trophies had
hung and, as a gi to Patsy, turn it into a place where she could
raise flowers and also exhibit her crasmanship. His plan was
carried out. Even the sign of his “geing well” had to be
fantastic!
CHAPTER SEVEN

Mourning and oedipal issues

A er the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the

Soviet Union, and later victory in the Persian Gulf by
the Americans and their Allies, one day Peter began talking on
the cou about international relations and stated that the
world was now leaderless. Not long thereaer, Dr. Pine and I
noticed that Peter wanted to test Gregory once more to see if
the older man could remain as an idealised object, as a leader.
He arranged to go with Gregory, just two of them, for a very
easy and conventional hunting trip—he took Gregory rabbit
hunting. Since he had frozen, unable to shoot a bla bear,
Peter knew that his grand-scale hunting days, his impulse to
slaughter herds of deer or pas of wolves, kill tigers or cobras,
were over. During the trip he noticed that the older man had
completely lost his hunting skills. No longer could aging
Gregory remain as an idealised object that could support
someone else’s grandiose self. Although this was something
that Peter had known before the rabbit hunt, he needed to test
it for a last time. Dr. Pine linked Peter’s reference to a
leaderless world to his finding himself without Gregory’s
psyological support. at evening the patient had a dream:
I was King Arthur’s ampion knight. I wanted the
King to wat me on my great horse. en I saw
someone who shouted: “e King is dead!”
When Peter came to his psyoanalytic session the next day, as
soon as he laid on the cou he said to Dr. Pine: “I had this
dream last evening that tells me that your remarks when we
met last time were absolutely correct.” He reported his King
Arthur dream, talked about “losing” Gregory as an ideal object
and how a world without a leader was analogous to his being
without Gregory. In turn, he no longer wanted to remain the
ampion knight on a big horse. He reported that some of his
associates had gone to Russia to verify the Russians’ nuclear
disarmament and joked that ICBM (intercontinental ballistic
missile) silos would soon be used to store grain. He confessed
that he longed to win a loery so he could leave the arms
business. He wished that he could get involved in new, non-
aggressive ventures su as advanced telecommunications or
electric automobiles. He shared the realities of his finances. He
would have to stay with the company he was associated with
for financial reasons for some time.
In spite of seeing him as a new, older and weaker stepfather,
Peter continued to be grateful to Gregory for making him a
man who became a war hero, received three Bronze Star
Medals and was an important person in the American weapons
industry. He could also accept easily that in spite of the support
he had received from Gregory, he could not integrate his
ildhood dependent, unsuccessful love-seeking (libidinal
objects) part with his aggressor/hero part. Now he wanted to
explore his relationship with Gregory further to see if this
would help accomplish and maintain his internal integration.
I encouraged Dr. Pine to bring Gregory’s purple martin
birdhouse story to Peter’s aention once more. When this was
done Peter anowledged that he was like a lile bird for
Gregory, a reservoir for Gregory (his traumatised self-image)
who would not die in a prison camp, but who would fly to
freedom, and be the aggressor. Peter became more aware that
by wating the aggressive hunter model provided by Peter, his
stepfather could feel secure in the belief that he would never
return to the prison camps (to their images/memories) and
would instead have a “normal” life without suffering from
ronic post-traumatic symptoms. Peter realised that in finding
a “solution” to deal with Gregory’s and his own traumatised
self-images that were intertwined within him, he had
developed behaviour paerns su as his unusual sadistic
hunting habit and preoccupation with taxidermy—to maintain
this “solution” adult Peter had paid a big price. With an ability
to experience sadness, he verbalised that the biggest price he
had paid was not allowing himself to have more time to enjoy
Patsy and his three ildren, and be a comfortable husband,
father and family man.
Peter said that he was surprised when he realised that he
liked helping Patsy take care of her flowers and plants. In the
past he would have considered su acts to be “sissy”. Now, he
said, he understood that a man can enjoy the beauty of flowers
and wat life develop before his eyes: plants growing in their
pots and leaves opening. He was also asking the twins about
their soolwork and boyfriends. However, he told Dr. Pine
that while doing su things he felt “amateurish”. Sometimes
he would try to show the anges within himself through
grandiose acts, su as turning his trophy hall into a gi for
Patsy almost overnight. He no longer desired to return to being
a “number one” person or a “hungry” one. He would prefer to
be called an environmentalist, like his oldest daughter, instead
of a hunter. He no longer had drinking problems or bulimia.
But, he knew that he needed more work to feel comfortable
and less amateurish as a anged man.
Peter also appeared “amateurish” when he wanted Dr. Pine
to notice anges in him. I told Dr. Pine not to make remarks as
if he were giving high marks to an elementary sool student,
or praise Peter for his efforts to improve. Su an approa
would embarrass Peter and inhibit him from trying new ways
of behaving at home and at work. If Dr. Pine noticed that Peter
felt discouraged, the analyst would make simple remarks su
as, “What is our hurry?” or “Let’s see what will develop.” When
Dr. Pine followed this line of approa Peter presented another
meaning for his preoccupation with hunting; he said that
hunting not only enabled him to disarge aggression, but it
gave one part of him pleasure in “communicating with nature”.
Upon this reflection, Dr. Pine made an interpretation and spoke
of nature as “the good mother”.
Sensing that Peter was also seeing him as a “good mother”,
Dr. Pine was emotionally moved. He felt good and confessed to
me that reviewing his notes on his most recent session with
Peter before driving to my office for supervision had brought
tears to his eyes. He once more told me of his loss of his
mother when he was a baby. But, now he could have a “good
mother” image within himself, even though as a baby he did
not have a mother. is time Dr. Pine did not have another
“parapraxis”. He spent the supervisory hour telling me how,
while on my former mentor’s cou, he was able to mourn his
ildhood losses and have a more solid personality. He said
that Peter’s working ego was very mu in tune with his own,
and his patient now experienced him as a truly “new” object,
someone to be neither devalued nor idealised. “I realised that
Peter had become more comfortable in relating to me and no
longer perceived me as a threat or an ideal,” he added.
Instead of talking about hunting, Peter brought stories of
football mates he was wating on television. One football
team evolved as his favourite, and he actually began travelling
to aend this team’s games. Aggression felt and exhibited at a
football game was quite different from that experienced on the
field of bale or while butering hundreds of deer. With some
people he was trying to become friendly with, Peter placed bets
on a special football game and planned to give the purse to a
home for disturbed ildren. He wanted, Dr. Pine and I
thought, to test himself as a “good parent” for needy ildren.
During this time, however, his mother had a minor operation.
When he realised that he had failed to call her with
encouragement, Peter appeared as if he was ashamed, but
stated that he was searing for other places and other
activities to find out what a “good mother” is. We noted that
when Peter further identified with his analyst and owned a
good mother image within himself, he would be readier to give
up his ildhood traumatised core.
Mourning is an obligatory psyobiological response to any
significant loss, concrete or abstract, or even to the threat of
any loss. Freud’s (1917e) “Mourning and melanolia” is the
first paper that deals with internalised object relations. It refers
to the object relations and internal work of an adult mourner.
e work of mourning refers to an internal encounter between
the images of the lost object and the corresponding self-images
of the mourner. I reviewed and expanded Freud’s ideas on
mourning, especially by focusing on what I call “perennial
mourners”. Unending mourning may lead to pathological
symptoms as well as creative activities (Volkan, 1981b, 2007a,
2007b, 2013b; Volkan & Zintl, 1993). Since mental images of lost
persons or things remain in our psye even when they are
tamed, shrunk, repressed or denied, adult-type mourning, in a
sense, never ends until the mourner dies (see also: Kernberg,
2010). What the completion of a “normal” mourning process
means, as Veikko Tähkä (1984, 1993) stated, is that the mourner
makes the mental images of the lost person or thing
“futureless”. e images of the lost item have no future. A
young man stops fantasising that a wife who had been dead for
some time will give him sexual pleasure, for example. Or, a
woman stops wishing to boss her underlings at a job from
whi she had been fired years before. People in
psyoanalysis also need to mourn as they give up their old
self or object images.
Analysts tell stories of patients’ and sometimes their own
mourning when their patients enter the termination phase of
treatment. In those situations there will be a concrete loss; two
persons will lose seeing one another intensely. Two persons
will be actually separated. But mourning also occurs when we
face abstract losses, su as prestige, honour, and investment in
our old self- and object images—in Peter’s case, his investment
in both a grandiose self and a hungry self. A successful
mourning process refers to the mourner’s review of the images
of persons or things that are lost (or whi will be lost) again
and again, and then aieving the ability to no longer be
psyologically preoccupied with the mental images of what
was given up—in other words, making su images
“futureless”.
Dr. Pine and I noted that at this phase of his patient’s
analytic work, during the laer part of his fourth year in
treatment, it would be most important for the analyst to keep
in mind Peter’s work on mourning. Peter’s review of his old
self- and object images in a general way, and his aempts to
modify them could be considered an aspect of his mourning
process. But I thought of a specific aspect of loss and mourning
that Peter needed to go through. e primary and complicated
loss for Peter would be the adult Gregory’s traumatised image
in him, whi was intertwined with ild Peter’s own
traumatised self-image from his ildhood on. Let me explain:
Peter as an adult held on to his grandiose self, also supported
by Gregory, but this time as an ideal object, and separated it
from his hungry part. If he were to truly lose his grandiose self
he would be at the mercy of his hungry self unless he also truly
lost his ildhood traumatised self. Since his ildhood
traumatised self was the location where adult Gregory’s
traumatised self lived, Peter needed to take Gregory’s image
out of his internal world and give it ba to its original owner,
Gregory. en, he would truly not need the support of the
idealised object, or to have “aggressive triumphs”, or maintain
a grandiose self. is would allow him to modify his own
traumatised self with the help of the analytic new object he
was internalising. Now I will relate the story of Peter’s
fascinating psyological aempt to do this and stabilise his
anged internal structure in order to truly get well.
I was amazed when I learned Peter’s “plan” to lose Gregory’s
internalised traumatised self that resided within him, to give it
ba to Gregory, and to carry this out without hurting him. I
must add here that Dr. Pine never gave his patient suggestions
or advice about actions he could take. at kind of approa
would be “managing” an analysand’s life; it would not work.
When I supervise colleagues while they are analysing others, I
always try to protect them from turning into “managers” of
others’ lives (Volkan, 2010). e fact is that in psyoanalytic
institutes there are no classes that tea candidates how to be
“managers” of their patients’ lives. Peter did not come up with
his own “plan” by first siing down, thinking about it, and
actually designing it. e plan that he came up with was part
of his psyoanalytic work on the cou; it arose as a part of
his geing well without any initial conscious deliberation.
e fiieth anniversary of the Bataan Death Mar was
approaing and there would be ceremonies in different parts
of the United States. Peter was following the news, and he
heard of a group of individuals’ efforts to communicate with
the US Congress and obtain different types of medals for some
Bataan Death Mar survivors as part of the fiieth
anniversary celebrations. On the cou Peter started talking
about the fact that he had three Bronze Star Medals and
Gregory had none. He concluded that this was not fair. Aer
all, Gregory’s bravery in surviving the Bataan Death Mar
and Japanese prison camps should surpass Peter’s bravery
during his dare-devil war experiences in Vietnam. e idea
came to him that if Gregory was given a Silver Star Medal the
older man would be “forced” to re-own his traumatised self-
image; no longer would Peter be a “reservoir” for this image.
Peter thought that since Gregory would be honoured in public
by high-level political and military authorities, and would
receive support for his self-esteem he would be able to handle
his past disturbing mental image. Peter joined the efforts of
others who were trying to obtain medals for other Bataan
Death Mar survivors, and he began using his contacts with
congressmen and senators to promote the issuing of a Silver
Star Medal for his stepfather. Dr. Pine and I thought that, in a
sense, Peter wanted to “bury” Gregory’s traumatised self-image
and put a monument (the Silver Star Medal) on top of it. Dr.
Pine interpreted what Peter was doing as a sign of mourning.
Peter was geing ready to let an image, whi had been part of
him since his ildhood, become “futureless”.
Peter had to wait for some months for congressional
approval for his stepfather’s and others’ medals to come
through. He stated anxiously that he would memorialise his
ideal object, Gregory, in public when the older man would
receive a medal. is meant that aer this event Gregory,
psyologically speaking, would not be around or would not be
within him. Because of this, he added, he had no oice but to
recall and explore more of his early traumas, conflicts, wishes,
and anxieties. Peter poured his heart out on the cou with
more detailed memories, while experiencing various affects,
reviewing images that he had been carrying within himself and
whi he now wanted to make “futureless” too. is time, as I
will describe below, Dr. Pine and I started to hear his
sexualised fears, and then oedipal aspects of these images and
his aempt to free himself from oedipal struggles.
e first night aer he heard the Congressional approval, he
had a dream:
In my dream I knew I was on another planet and alone.
I was looking for food when I saw a woman wearing a
red bikini. Maybe we were in a spacecra. She was
joined by a second woman.
Peter said that he might have been frightened while having
this dream because he stirred in his sleep and Patsy had to
wake him. He was aware that he was dreaming about his
ildhood with two women. e day residue had come from a
science fiction film he had wated before going to sleep, about
the sear for another planet for human habitation. He noted
that his ildhood living conditions were like being in a
different world. He wanted to come to the real and present
world. Generalising the psyological damage he had
experienced in ildhood, Peter talked about the damage
humans had done to the ozone layer, and fantasised finding
“new energy” for survival without causing su damage. He
wanted to protect “nature”, the “good mother”. Dr. Pine told
Peter that without Gregory’s image in him he would also lose
the idealised Gregory giving him directions to be aggressive
and saving him from intrusive women. He added that Peter
was looking for “new energy”, new ways to heal.
In his next two sessions Peter continued to associate to this
dream, recalling more details of his early life with two women.
We learned that during his first years of life he had called his
grandmother “mother”. Apparently Peter began to call the right
woman “mother” aer Gregory married her and they le the
grandmother behind, and when Peter had his own bed. He
recalled a sense of relief when he heard about his
grandmother’s death when he was in military sool.
ere was no recollection of the grandmother abusing Peter
sexually. But sharing a bed with her was most traumatic.
Sometimes he would wake up and notice that “the wit” was
sleeping with her arms or legs on top of him. Earlier Peter had
focused on the hair on his grandmother’s face. Now he was
able to recollect and focus on her genital hair, and was able to
speak about his toothed vagina (vagina dentata) fantasies
when, as a young man, he began his sexual encounters with
women. One reason why he would never see the waitress with
whom he experienced his very first intercourse was his fear of
her vagina. Now he realised that his vagina dentata fantasies
when he was younger and his being inhibited sexually in his
marriage until recently were connected with his ildhood fear
of his grandmother’s genitalia. Understanding this gave Peter a
sense of relief.
Soon aer the congressional authorisation of the Silver Star
Medal for some Bataan Death Mar survivors Peter learned
that Gregory and his mother were puing their big home, in
whi they had lived for decades, on the market so they could
resele in a resort area on a bea in South Carolina. Peter
thought that when his stepfather had learned that he would get
a medal, it had made a big psyological impact on Gregory,
who could now could ange his lifestyle, release his obsession
with the purple martin house and the Saint Joseph statue on a
submarine, and move to South Carolina with Peter’s mother.
Peter’s stepfather called him and told him he did not plan to
take some of his “tools” with him when he moved; he offered
them to Peter. Gregory’s offer, as day residue, induced a dream
in Peter that evening:
I was together with Gregory and we had a severe
disagreement over administrative maers.
Peter could not remember the details of the administrative
maers or the disagreement in the dream. He remembered how
during earlier years his mother and grandmother would oen
devalue Peter’s real father in front of him. Lile Peter knew
that other kids had fathers and he did not have one. is
humiliated him. One day aer Gregory moved in with them,
Peter proudly pointed at Gregory in front of other ildren in
the neighbourhood and said: “See! I have a father too.” He
needed Gregory so mu that he could not anowledge
having feelings about Gregory taking his mother away from
him or his mother paying more aention to Gregory than to
her lile son. His mother did not do mu or, because she had
to work, could not do mu as her son’s primary caregiver; she
allowed her mother—“the wit”—to dominate lile Peter, and
Gregory to become a “saviour”. Peter told Dr. Pine how he had
an unpleasant sensation when Gregory told him to come and
take his “tools”. e word “tool” reminded him of a “toy pistol”
and he reported an event that included this “tool”.
Following their marriage, Peter’s mother and Gregory le
for a sort of honeymoon trip. Before they le Gregory had
given Peter a toy pistol. During their honeymoon the couple
appeared for some reason on a radio show, to whi lile Peter
listened with his grandmother. On the cou adult Peter
remembered how angry he was because Gregory had taken his
mother away from him, and receiving the toy pistol felt like he
was being bribed. When he heard the couple on the radio show
enjoying themselves, his anger about Gregory taking his
mother away increased and he was also upset with his mother
for loving Gregory more than she did her son. So the next day
he broke the toy pistol into pieces. He became very afraid that
he would be punished when the couple returned. Now he
vividly remembered Gregory asking his mother what should be
done to lile Peter for breaking the toy pistol, and his mother
saying: “He is your son now. Do what you want!” He was
impressed by his new stepfather’s oice not to punish him.
But, he also knew that he feared his stepfather.
Recalling this memory, Peter began making more remarks
concerning a triangular relationship between his mother,
Gregory, and himself. For weeks he compared himself with his
stepfather. For example, Peter compared his guns with
Gregory’s guns. His guns were beer. He told Dr. Pine that
Gregory had never in fact been a skilful hunter but that he had
gone hunting with Peter because he thought it would foster the
boy’s self-esteem. When Gregory called and said that he was
leaving his “tools” to him, his “bad” sensation was connected
with a thought that his offer implied that Gregory thought
Peter needed to borrow a “tool” from the older man. Now
Gregory and his mother were going to take another trip and his
stepfather was going to bribe him again with a useless toy! Dr.
Pine responded: “You want to tell Gregory that you have your
own penis and you do not need his.” Peter started laughing and
relaxed. He stated that in spite of experiencing angry feelings
towards Gregory because he took his mother away and became
his mother’s “number one” man, still there were good qualities
in Gregory. But oedipal issues continued to come up on the
cou. Peter would come to understand how he had also
utilised su issues to grasp on to a grandiose self for most of
his adult life.
Peter began admiing that, even though he was selected as
the “top gun” of his flying sool, he had encountered flying
phobias, including at times when he was in Vietnam. He
remarked that “the sea above [cumulus clouds] is as dangerous
as the one below,” and this led to days of discussion on the
cou of Daedalus and Icarus. As I write this book I do not
recall if Peter or Dr. Pine brought up the Greek myth. But, I do
remember how discussions about the Daedalus and Icarus
story allowed Peter to understand the oedipal issues between
him and Gregory.
As the story goes, Daedalus constructed two pairs of wings
from feathers and wax to help him and his son Icarus fly away
from Crete and escape the island. He warned his son not to fly
too high because the sun would melt the wax. He also told
Icarus not to fly too low because the foam from the sea would
soak the feathers. When Icarus started to fly too high, melting
the wax and ruining his wings, he fell into the sea and
drowned.
Peter’s fear of flying too high reminded him of the fate of
Icarus, whose wings detaed themselves (castrated). On the
surface he could fly higher than Gregory, be more aggressive
than Gregory, but he had to hide his flying phobia from
Gregory and, until now, from Dr. Pine. He was also afraid of
flying too low lest he be engulfed by water/earth/mother and
grandmother. Peter thought about previous talks with Dr. Pine
about his being a fledgling flying to freedom from the purple
martin birdhouse. He now understood that unlike the lile
birds he could not find true freedom. His freedom was
restricted; Gregory in him could not truly escape from his
prison camps. Peter said that now he understood this and also
another factor in his holding on to his former grandiosity and
aggression. He was stu between fear of engulfment and fear
of castration, and had adopted holding on to his grandiosity
and killing of animals to maintain the illusion that he was
above all fear.
Soon Peter confessed that he had another phobia. He had a
fear of going over bridges—the threat of geing stu beyond
the halfway point. Without any help from Dr. Pine he
interpreted the reason for this phobia as being the same as he
had understood the meaning of his own Daedalus and Icarus
myth earlier. As he pondered the meaning of these phobias, he
had a dream that reflected his desire to be rid of them.
I was busy, and sensed that I was supposed to be doing
things I didn’t want to do. I was stu in a car halfway
over a bridge. en I said, “What the hell!” and drove
through.
en there was a widely publicised flight to Florida that
crashed into a bridge on take-off. Peter did in reality fly to
Florida on business within a few days of the accident and
reported no anxiety during the flight. Dr. Pine reported to me
that Peter was looking beer, and seemed most introspective.
As the fih Christmas in his treatment approaed, Peter
made arrangements to bring his wife, his three ildren, his
oldest daughter’s boyfriend, his mother, and Gregory under
one roof for a celebration. He told Dr. Pine that this really
would be a private celebration of his geing well. He still
respected Gregory, but now he had deep knowledge about his
special relationship with him. He knew that there was no need
for him to share with Gregory what he had learned during his
analysis. He no longer felt rejected by his mother and he
thought of and appreciated the difficult times she had gone
through. ere was a time when he considered Patsy as
overpowering, but now he appreciated her so mu because
she had stood by him all these years. He was like a discoverer,
hearing his twins’ daily lives and noticing that their lives did
not seem to have obsessive missions. In fact, the girls were
satisfied with their lives. He was curious to meet his oldest
daughter’s boyfriend who was a veterinarian. Since Patsy had
told him that his daughter and this young man had started to
talk about marriage in the future and working together aer
her graduation, Peter wanted to test himself and see how he
would feel about this man.
Peter bought an enormous Christmas tree, far too big for the
house. When he started to lop some of the branes off outside
the house he started laughing out loud. He had just realised
that once more he wanted to express his internal anges with
a grand gesture as he had done when he turned his special
trophy hall over to his wife and got rid of his trophies, mostly
donating them to people he knew who had taxidermy hobbies.
Patsy heard him laughing, came out, and asked him what was
funny. He dropped the saw he was using and told Patsy about
what he had just realised. He explained how his old
grandiosity showed its face in something good that he so mu
wanted to do, “to show you that I am a good husband and I
enjoy my family. I do not need to show my love to you all by
buying a huge tree.” Patsy said to him: “Peter, don’t you know
how mu you have anged during these last years? You are a
good man.” en she hugged him and whispered: “I love you.”
When reporting this incident on the cou, Peter could not
hold ba his tears.
According to him, the evening went extremely well. He was,
as he described, like a happy ild. Aer Gregory, his mother
and twins went to bed; before joining Patsy who was still
doing some cleaning in the kiten, Peter ended up alone with
his oldest daughter and the young veterinarian in the hall
surrounded by flowers and plants. He was interested in the
young man’s work with animals at a veterinary clinic. As he
listened to him he realised this young man and his daughter
were “animal lovers”. He wanted to tell them that he would no
longer kill animals, but kept this decision to himself.
e next day, as he had promised his daughter the evening
before, Peter began to write a eque as a donation to an
animal shelter. He had an impulse to donate a very huge sum.
en, according to him, he started to laugh again and made out
a eque that an “average person” in his financial situation
would write. On the cou suddenly he said: “God holds us
accountable for the animals we kill. I am trying to live up to
things.” He looked sombre.
Aer reporting details of his family gathering, Peter said to
Dr. Pine: “I have no phobias le, I have no more secrets from
you; I took sto; I am okay. I guess we can end my treatment.”
Dr. Pine discussed Peter’s request with me. Aer this he told
Peter that they should not stop working right away. Major
events were coming: Gregory would receive a Silver Star
Medal, and he and Peter’s mother would move to South
Carolina. Gregory’s medal ceremony would take place a lile
over two months later. e patient and the analyst agreed that
Peter’s analysis would end aer four months.
CHAPTER EIGHT

A “second look”, freeing a bird, and

the end of psyoanalytic work

T he news that Gregory and his mother’s house was being

sold, and that the couple were planning to spend the rest
of their lives in a large apartment overlooking the sea in a
resort area of South Carolina, started up Peter’s grief and
mourning over his lost ildhood in earnest. is process
included a kind of “second look”. is concept—the second look
—was first described by Samuel Novey in 1968. At that time an
analysand’s expression of a psyological process with an
action was typically considered “bad” and was almost always
labelled “acting out”. Harold Blum questioned the concept of
acting out in 1976. He stated that in its classical sense “acting
out” is usually considered a “formidable resistance outside the
psyoanalytic scrutiny; but it may also represent efforts to
master trauma, and a transference development coincident
with analytic work and a step toward sublimated activity” (p.
183).
Samuel Novey’s concept had therapeutic value. He wrote
about the story of a young man who le his home in Baltimore
to spend the weekend in southern Maryland and found himself
before a small house he discovered to be his birthplace. is
experience persuaded Novey to consider that:
the first and most evident function of revisiting old
scenes is the interest of mastering the past. Freud using
an analogy from the play of ildren developed this
thesis. He advanced the view that ildren repeat
unpleasurable experiences so that they can actively
master the situation whi they had first experienced
passively. (Novey, 1968, p. 71)
Writing about the impulsive trip this young man in analysis
took to his birthplace, Novey described his patient’s realisation
that the environmental features he remembered as being of
terrifying size—a door or a ro, for example—were actually
small by adult standards. Novey added: “is validation of
facts and places, I considered not ‘acting out’ in the sense of
acting in the service of not remembering but rather acting
whi reversed previous avoidance” (p. 86). Warren Poland and
I described a phenomenon we called “pilgrimage” that is
similar to Novey’s concept of “the second look”. We referred to
pilgrimages to places important in a person’s own history with
the goal of mastering internal conflicts, including
transgenerational ones (Poland, 1977; Volkan, 1979).
Aer hearing that Gregory and his mother’s house had been
sold, Peter drove to visit them as they were paing to leave.
When he arrived there he saw Gregory mixing paint, preparing
to repaint the purple martin house. Peter was surprised since
the birds would not arrive for some months and by that time
Gregory would have moved away. But then the realisation of
Gregory’s investment in the birdhouse hit him. Peter ended up
having a “second look” experience. While his mother and
stepfather were busy going from room to room in the house
and walking through the huge garden, Peter looked around and
intellectually and emotionally understood something that he
had been exposed to when he lived there as a ild and
youngster—a denial, on the surface, of Gregory’s traumatic
experiences. ere was not one single item in the whole house
directly indicating that Gregory had been a survivor of the
Bataan Death Mar and Japanese prison camps. No pictures,
no books, no memorabilia connecting Gregory to his traumatic
past could be found. ere was only one exception: the Saint
Joseph statue on a “submarine” in the garden was made by a
fellow survivor of the Bataan Death Mar and Japanese
camps. It stood next to the multistoried purple martin house.
Realising Gregory’s astonishing decades of investment in the
birdhouse made Peter truly appreciate what he had learned
during his analysis. For Gregory, the purple martin house was
the symbol of a prison camp, in whi no death could ever
occur and from whi the fledglings could fly to freedom. He
thought of sharing this with Gregory, but knowing that this
would disturb the older man emotionally, he did not broa the
subject.
Peter went to the aic, where he found a big cardboard box
with his name wrien on it in marker pen. He vaguely
remembered that aer he had gone to the military academy his
mother had collected his sool belongings and put them in a
box. is box had remained in the aic, unopened for decades.
Now Peter opened it and the first things he found were some
textbooks, comic books, assorted sool assignments, pencils,
and a range of pictures. When he looked at the pictures he
noticed that he almost always appeared in them alone, very
seldom with other students or his parents. is also made him
anowledge his history of loneliness. He was puing things
away and suddenly a newspaper clipping fell out of one of the
books; it showed a picture of people from the Bataan Death
Mar. Peter had remembered during his analysis that before
his first hunting experience with Gregory he had been
preoccupied with Gregory’s war experiences and had seared
for pictures of American soldiers in the Philippines. Seeing that
he had kept this newspaper clipping stru him deeply and
gave him pause to reflect. But what really made him almost
tremble with emotion was finding a bla and white picture,
also hidden between the pages of a book, of a young Peter,
whi apparently had been taken the day before Gregory and
Libby’s honeymoon. In this picture Peter was holding a toy
pistol.
Soon aer this discovery, Gregory called Peter downstairs
and asked him to come and see the “tools” that he was giving
away. He said Peter could take anything he wanted, and was
also ready to give his stepson his guns. e first thought that
came to Peter’s mind was that his own guns were beer than
Gregory’s. He stuered while searing for a kind way to turn
down these “tools”, and eventually mustered a polite refusal.
Late that aernoon Peter went out for an early dinner with
his mother and Gregory. When they returned home Libby
disappeared and then returned carrying a bundle of envelopes
bound with a rubber band—leers Peter had wrien to her and
Gregory from Vietnam. He was moved by a feeling that, aer
all, his mother loved him and had kept his leers. He read
them and noticed that none of them contained human concerns
about the death and destruction he had witnessed there. She
also presented him with two old pictures. Peter appeared in
both of them as a ild; in one picture he was with her and in
the second one with his grandmother. Looking at the first
picture, he once more appreciated how beautiful Libby had
been as a young woman. e second picture reminded him of
how his grandmother had told him wolf stories before he went
to sleep and that some of his nightmares included wolves.
When Peter le the couple’s house he took with him his
baby buggy, Gregory’s framed high sool diploma, the leers,
and the two pictures his mother had just given him. He knew
that he could not refuse to take the picture of his grandmother.
In any case, he wanted to take it so that reminders of all
persons in his ildhood environment would be represented
among the mementoes he took home. e next day on Dr.
Pine’s cou Peter stated that the resolution of his “problems”
had been completed and he did not plan on returning to his old
behaviour paerns.
During this and the sessions that followed Peter appeared
sad. He wanted Dr. Pine to know that he was not depressed,
just sad. He had been asked to be a guest at a large hunting
party in Canada, and he had permission to take time off from
his job, even though at the time he played a crucial role in
negotiations for a billion-dollar deal that would involve a
merger with another company. He declined to join the hunting
party, although in the past he would have jumped at the ance
to take his pi of the kill, and to mount the heads of the beasts
he had killed while feeling omnipotent. “I have so mu work
to do,” he said to his analyst. “Besides, I don’t want to miss our
sessions.” He went on to tell of his insight that his analyst had
replaced his formerly idealised stepfather. His analyst,
however, was different from his stepfather. “You are different,
and I am different. You don’t force me to do anything. I have
been finding out what is good for me,” he added and then said,
“is room is like the martin house. I know I’ll soon be ready
to fly away. I will not have a fate like Icarus; I will truly fly
away to freedom and find internal comfort.” He knew that he
would be sad to leave Dr. Pine. “I am sad already,” he
murmured. During his supervision hour that followed, Dr. Pine
told me with satisfaction that Peter was right.
Soon the merger between the two companies was
successfully arranged. Legal and financial considerations made
it necessary to keep this deal secret, and when Peter realised
how mu he had told his analyst about it, he decided that this
was because he had developed a deep trust in him and their
work together. e presidential campaign in the United States
was in full swing at the time, and most of his political friends
were occupied with domestic politics. Peter saw the Fren
moving into the American defence industry, cornering the
world arms market, and that the death and destruction would
continue. Although he anowledged that the business he
knew best dealt with weapons, he no longer perceived it as
giving him an omnipotent li. He stated that aer the merger
he would try to deal within the electronic communications
industry.
Peter was greatly excited over the ceremony in whi his
stepfather received his Silver Star Medal. Other Bataan Death
Mar survivors received awards too, and Peter sat next to
very important political figures at the ceremony. When he
reported the event on the cou he was full of emotion, but
there was no name-dropping or bragging. e night aer his
psyoanalytic session Peter had a dream:
I saw a herd of deer. I did not kill even one of them.
While reporting his dream Peter wore a big smile. ere was
no need for Dr. Pine to talk or make an interpretation.
About ten days aer receiving his medal Gregory and his
wife moved to South Carolina, aer Peter, this time with Patsy,
visited them for the last time in their old house. Everything
went well. During his session on the cou Peter continued to
review not only his ildhood, but also aspects of his treatment
with Dr. Pine. Recalling their initial years, he regreed how he
had treated Dr. Pine, and now found his old grandiose habits
“silly”. Dr. Pine and I were very pleased with how Peter’s
termination phase was taking place.
en, four days aer having seled in their South Carolina
apartment, his mother gave Peter a call. She told her son that
Gregory was having panic aas and could not sleep because
of nightmares. He had become an absolutely different man,
looking bewildered and scared. She did not know what to do.
Would Peter help? Peter flew to South Carolina and saw
Gregory’s misery first hand. When he enquired directly,
Gregory admied that in his nightmares he was reliving some
images from the Bataan Death Mar and the prison camps.
When Peter came ba to his first session aer visiting
Gregory, rather calmly and with deep psyological insight, he
spoke on the cou about how his “plan” of giving Gregory’s
self-image of his wartime trauma ba to his stepfather had not
worked, in spite of the fact that Gregory had been recognised
and given a medal for his suffering. To tell the truth, neither
Dr. Pine nor I were expecting this development, and we too
were surprised. Dr. Pine agreed with Peter’s understanding of
what had happened to Gregory. Peter had guilt feelings for
returning Gregory’s traumatised self. He said that if he did not
do something, Gregory would die and Peter himself would be a
“murderer”, doomed to live with the guilt. On the other hand,
if he found a way to take ba what he had given Gregory he
would be doomed never to become truly psyologically
healthy.
He had to come up with a new “plan”. Peter knew that
Gregory’s utilisation of the purple martin house was Gregory’s
main psyological instrument in his successful decades-long
externalisation of his life in the Philippines, and he had been
able to control it “out there”, in addition to using lile Peter as
a reservoir for the same purpose. Besides losing Peter, Gregory
had also lost his prison where no death could take place. Peter
called Gregory and asked him if he wanted to come ba to his
original home. Gregory said “yes” and appeared to experience
great relief.
Peter drove to his ildhood town and met the person who
was now the new owner of the house. is man was a
physician who had just retired from practising medicine and
teaing at a medical sool in a northern state with very cold
winters. He and his wife had bought the house to be near their
son, his wife, and their three ildren. e son was also a
physician who had a practice not too far from the house his
parents now owned. Peter asked to buy the house ba for his
stepfather. Without going into detail, Peter tried to explain how
this place was emotionally important for his parents and that
they were not happy in South Carolina. Even though Peter
offered twice the amount of money than the retired physician
had paid for the house, the new owner would not sell it ba.
e new owners were Jewish, so the statue of Saint Joseph
had already been removed and disposed of, but the purple
martin house still stood untoued. e new owner did not
wish to have birds nesting in his garden and had no objection
to Peter removing it from his property. Peter talked to the
owner of another house with a big garden on the same street,
almost next door to Gregory and his mother’s original place.
He bought this property and had the birdhouse transferred
from its old location to the garden of the house that now
belonged to Gregory and his wife. Once the birdhouse was
firmly re-erected Gregory and Libby returned to this new
house. Right away Gregory again became preoccupied with
repainting the birdhouse and puing numbers on ea
“apartment”. Soon Gregory’s panic aas and nightmares
disappeared. With Peter’s help the apartment in South Carolina
was resold with no financial loss.
e unexpected activities described above took place just
prior to the termination date for Peter’s psyoanalytic work.
Dr. Pine asked Peter if they should discuss anging the date in
order to examine further what had happened. Peter thought
about this and stated that the termination date should stay
unanged. Aer all, in spite of the unusual events, internally
he felt solid, in arge of his faculties, and remained
emotionally healthy. Dr. Pine respected Peter’s decision.
During the last weeks of his analysis Peter had long talks with
Patsy and explained to her his understanding of the reasons
why Gregory and his mother had to come ba and why re-
erecting the birdhouse was crucial. He received his wife’s
support and appreciation. ey also explained the situation to
their ildren.
I was not expecting to witness another “drama” in Gregory’s
case, but one more unusual event surfaced. Peter’s last session
would take place on a Monday. e day before, Peter was
siing in the big hall in his house, now full of poed plants and
flowers, reading his Sunday paper. He reported to Dr. Pine that
he was feeling very good and comfortable. He heard a noise
coming from the fireplace. ere was no fire going so he went
to see where the noise was coming from. He realised that a
bird had flown down the imney and become trapped there,
unable to fly up again or down into the fireplace. Peter opened
the flue, whi provided an opening for the bird to enter the
fireplace and then fly out of the house. is situation fascinated
Peter. He was not a religious man, but he thought that
somehow a last “test” was given to him before the end of his
analysis. Can a bird/he really fly to freedom? Would he let
another creature die or save it? During his last session with Dr.
Pine, with humour, laughter, and wonder, he described how he
had climbed to the roof and used a long sti to encourage the
bird to fly down into the fireplace and escape. When this did
not work he got a garden hose, dragged it onto the roof, and
squirted water gently into the imney. is forced the bird to
fly from the fireplace into the hall. Peter came down and
opened a big window. e bird flew away and Peter felt deep
happiness.
Aer telling this story Peter got off the cou and sat in
front of Dr. Pine, smiling, for a short time. en he stood up,
shook Dr. Pine’s hand firmly and said: “I am a free man now.
ank you”, and le the office. When Dr. Pine finished
describing the last “drama” in Peter’s case he got up from his
air, shook my hand firmly, said “thank you”, and le my
office.
e reader may have more questions about Peter’s life and
his psyoanalytic process. I explored Peter’s internal world
and the anges in it only through utilising the data that was
available to me. In the book, I also made some references to Dr.
Pine’s countertransference responses that can be considered
not therapeutic and gave some explanations for them. e
reader may also wonder about my feelings about working with
an individual like Peter, even behind the scenes. Due to my
baground, I had a strong motivation to explore concepts of
depositing, transgenerational transmissions of psyological
tasks, and the influence of wars on people. I have wrien
extensively and in some detail about my involvement in these
topics, about how external and internal wars have been
intertwined in my psye, and why I have been involved in
decades-long work to understand psyological obstacles to
having a more peaceful world (for example, see: Volkan, 2012,
2013a).
About a year aer our work ended I received a note from Dr.
Pine thanking me for standing by him while he treated Peter.
He stated that his own treatment with my former mentor had
ended and this, as well as his work with me, had been very
helpful for him in planning a more comfortable future for
himself. He informed me that he had once more closed his
psyiatric practice, this time for good. He said goodbye to me,
since he was leaving Virginia to sele elsewhere, and I never
heard from him again. Under the most unusual circumstances
described earlier in this book, Dr. Pine and I were able to help
Peter to also have a mu more comfortable life. Peter, in turn
provided for the psyoanalytic literature an extraordinary
illustration of the concept of transgenerational transmission of
trauma and its consequences.
REFERENCES
Ainslie, R. C., & Solyom, A. E. (1986). e replacement of the fantasied oedipal ild:
A disruptive effect of sibling loss on the mother–infant relationship.
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 3: 257–268.

Akhtar, S. (1989). Kohut and Kernberg: A critical comparison. In: D. Detri & S.
Detri (Eds.), Self-Psychology: Comparisons and Contrasts (pp. 329–362). Hillside,
NY: Analytic Press.
Akhtar, S. (1992). Broken Structures: Severe Personality Disorders and Their
Treatment. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Akhtar, S. (2009). Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.

Baranger, W. (1991). Narcissism in Freud. In: J. Sandler, E. P. Person, & P. Fonagy
(Eds.), Freud’s “On Narcissism”: An Introduction (pp. 108–130). New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We
Like. New York: W. W. Norton.

Blos, P. (1967). e second individuation process of adolescence. Psychoanalytic

Study of the Child, 22: 162–186.

Blum, H. P. (1976). Acting out, the psyoanalytic process, and interpretation. The
Annual of Psychoanalysis, 4: 163–184.

Boesky, D. (2008). Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context. Lanham, MD: Jason

Aronson.
Bollas, C., & Sundelson, D. (1995). The New Informants: The Betrayal of
Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson.
Boyer, L. B. (1983). The Regressed Patient. New York: Jason Aronson.
Boyer, L. B. (1999). Countertransference and Regression. Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson.
Boyt, G., & Bur, D. L. (2004). Bataan: A Survivor’s Story. Norman, OK: Oklahoma
University Press.
Brenner, I. (2001). Dissociation of Trauma: Theory, Phenomenology, and Technique.
Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Brenner, I. (2004). Psychic Trauma: Dynamics, Symptoms, and Treatment. New York:
Jason Aronson.
Cain, A. C., & Cain, B. S. (1964). On replacing a ild. Journal of the American
Academy of Child Psychiatry, 3: 443–456.

Cameron, N. (1961). Introjection, reprojection, and hallucination in the interaction

between sizophrenic patient and therapist. The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 42: 86–96.

Cooper, A. M. (1989). Narcissism and masoism: e narcissistic-masoistic

aracter. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12: 541–552.
Cooper, A. M. (Ed.) (2006). Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America: Leading
Analysts Present Their Work. Washington, DC: American Psyiatric Publishing.
Dyess, W. E. (2002). Bataan Death March: A Survivor’s Account. Lincoln, NE: Bison.
Ekstein, R. N. (1966). Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse: Clinical
Studies on the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Severely Disturbed Children. East
Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Cros.
Emde, R. (1991). Positive emotions for psyoanalytic theory: Surprises from infancy
resear and new directions. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
[Supplement], 39: 5–44.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1959). Psychological Issues: Identity and the Life Cycle (Volume 1,
Monograph: 1). New York: International Universities Press.

Faimberg, H. (2005). The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic

Links Between Generations. London: Routledge.
Freud, A. (1965). Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of
Development. New York: International Universities Press.

Freud, S. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams. S. E., 4–5: 1–626. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1912e). Recommendations to physicians practising psyoanalysis. S. E.,
12: 111–120. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1917e). Mourning and melanolia. S. E., 14: 237–258. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1919a). Lines of advance in psyo-analytic therapy. S. E., 17: 157–168.
London: Hogarth.
Fromm, M. G. (2011). Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations.
London: Karnac.
Giovacini, P. L. (Ed.) (1972). Interpretation and the definition of the analytic
seing. In: Giovacini (Ed.), Tactics and Techniques in Psychoanalytic Therapy
(Volume 1) (pp. 5–94). New York: Science House.
Hartendorp, A. V. H. (1967). The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. Manila:
Bookmark.
Heimann, P. (1956). Dynamics of transference interpretations. The International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 37: 303–310.

Jacobson, E. (1964). The Self and the Object World. New York: International
Universities Press.
Kernberg, O. F. (1970). Factors in the psyoanalytic treatment of narcissistic
personalities. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 18: 51–85.
Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New
York: Jason Aronson.
Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis. New
York: Jason Aronson.
Kernberg, O. F. (1980). Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory
Applied. New York: Jason Aronson.
Kernberg, O. F. (2010). Some observations on the process of mourning. The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91: 601–619.

Kestenberg, J. S. (1982). A psyological assessment based on analysis of a survivor’s

ild. In: M. S. Bergman & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pp.
158–177). New York: Columbia University Press.
Kestenberg J. S., & Brenner, I. (1996). The Last Witness. Washington, DC: American
Psyiatric Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some sizoid meanisms. In: M. Klein, P. Heimann, S.
Isaacs, & J. Riviere (Eds.), Development of Psychoanalysis (pp. 292–320). London:
Hogarth.
Knox, D. (2002). Death March: The Survivors of Bataan. New York: Mariner.
Kogan, I. (1995). The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the
Second Generation of the Holocaust. London: Free Association.
Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and transformations of narcissism. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 14: 243–272.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York:
International Universities Press.
Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities
Press.
Laub, D., & Podell, D. (1997). Psyoanalytic listening to historical trauma: e
conflict of knowing and the imperative to act. Mind and Human Interaction, 8:
245–260.
Legg, C., & Sheri, I. (1976). e replacement ild: A developmental tragedy: Some
preliminary comments. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 7: 79–97.
Lehtonen, J. (2003). e dream between neuroscience and psyoanalysis: Has
feeding an infant impact on brain function and the capacity to create dream
images in infants? Psychoanalysis in Europe, 57: 175–183.
Levy, S. T. (1984). Psyoanalytic perspectives on emptiness. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 32: 387–404.

Loewald, H. W. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psyoanalysis. The

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41: 16–33.

Miaud, S. G., & Aynesworth, H. (2000). Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer.
Irving, TX: Authorlink.
Modell, A. H. (1975). A narcissistic defence against affects and the illusion of self-
sufficiency. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 56: 275–282.
Niederland, W. G. (1968). Clinical observations on the “survivor syndrome.” The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49: 313–315.

Novey, S. (1968). The Second Look: The Reconstruction of Personal History in

Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins.
Ogden, T. H. (2010). On three forms of thinking: Magical thinking, dream thinking,
and transformative thinking. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 79: 317–347.
Olini, S. L. (1964). e negative therapeutic reaction. The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 45: 540–548.

Olini, S. L. (1980). The Psychotherapeutic Instrument. New York: Jason Aronson.

Poland, W. S. (1977). Pilgrimage: Action and tradition in self-analysis. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 25: 399–416.

Poznanski, E. O. (1972). e “replacement ild”: A saga of unresolved parental grief.

Behavioral Pediatrics, 81: 1190–1193.

Rangell, L. (1980). The Mind of Watergate. New York: Norton.

Rangell, L. (2002). e theory of psyoanalysis: Vicissitudes of its evolution. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 50: 1109–1137.

Rangell, L. (2007). The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory. Plymouth, UK: Jason
Aronson.
Rapaport, D. (1951). Organization and Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Rapaport, E. A. (1960). Preparation for psyoanalysis. International Journal for
Psychoanalysis, 41: 626–632.

Rudden, M. G. (2011). e ‘secret cocoon’: Fantasies about the private self in the
absence of consensual reality. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 92:
359–376.
Sützenberger, A. A. (1998). The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational
Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree. New York: Routledge.
Shengold, L. (1985). Defensive anality and anal narcissism. The International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 66: 47–73.

Shengold, L. (1989). Soul Murder: The Affects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sherman, N. (2010). The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our
Soldiers. New York: Norton.

Spitz, R. (1965). The First Year of Life. New York: International Universities Press.
Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from
Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic.
Stone, M. H. (1989). Murder: Narcissistic personality disorder. Psychiatric Clinics of
North America, 12: 643–651.

Stone, M. H. (2009). The Anatomy of Evil. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

Straey, J. (1934). e nature of the therapeutic action of psyoanalysis. The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 15: 127–159.

Tähkä, V. (1984). Dealing with object loss. Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 7:

13–33.
Tähkä, V. (1993). Mind and Its Treatment: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Madison, CT:
International Universities Press.
Volkan, V. D. (1973). Transitional fantasies in the analysis of a narcissistic
personality. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 21: 351–376.
Volkan, V. D. (1974). Cosmic laughter: A study of primitive spliing. In: P. C.
Giovacini, A. Flarsheim, & L. B. Boyer (Eds.), Tactics and Technique of
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Volume 2), (pp. 425–440). New York: Jason
Aronson.
Volkan, V. D. (1976). Primitive Internalized Object Relations: A Clinical Study of
Schizophrenic, Borderline and Narcissistic Patients. New York: International
Universities Press.
Volkan, V. D. (1979). e glass bubble of a narcissistic patient. In: J. LeBoit & A.
Capponi (Eds.), Advances in Psychotherapy of the Borderline Patient (pp. 405–
431). New York: Jason Aronson.
Volkan, V. D. (1981a). Transference and countertransference: An examination from
the point of view of internalized object relations. In: S. Tuman, C. Kaye, & M.
Zimmermann (Eds.), Object and Self: A Developmental Approach (Essays in
Honor of Edith Jacobson) (pp. 429–451). New York: International Universities
Press.
Volkan, V. D. (1981b). Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena: A Study of the
Forms, Symptoms, Metapsychology, and Therapy of Complicated Mourning. New
York: International Universities Press.
Volkan, V. D. (1982). Narcissistic personality disorder. In: J. O. Canevar Jr. & H. K.
Brodie (Eds.), Critical Problems in Psychiatry (pp. 332–350). Philadelphia, PA: J. B.
Lippinco.
Volkan, V. D. (1984). What Do You Get When You Cross a Dandelion With a Rose?:
The True Story of a Psychoanalysis. New York: Jason Aronson.
Volkan, V. D. (1987). Six Steps in the Treatment of Borderline Personality
Organization. New York: Jason Aronson.

Volkan, V. D. (1993). Countertransference reactions commonly present in the

treatment of patients with borderline personality organization. In: A. Alexandris
& G. Vaslamatis (Eds.), Countertransference and How it Affects the Interpretive
Work (pp. 147–163). London: Karnac.

Volkan, V. D. (1995). The Infantile Psychotic Self: Understanding and Treating

Schizophrenics and Other Difficult Patients. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Volkan, V. D. (2006). Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts.
Charloesville, VA: Pitstone.
Volkan, V. D. (2007a). Individuals and societies as “perennial mourners”: eir
linking objects and public memorials. In: B. Wilco, L. C. Bohm, & R. Curtis
(Eds.), On Death and Endings: Psychoanalysts’ Reflections on Finality,
Transformations and New Beginnings (pp. 42–59). Philadelphia, PA: Routledge.

Volkan, V. D. (2007b). Not leing go: From individual perennial mourners to

societies with entitlement ideologies. In: L G. Fiorini, S. Lewkowicz, & T.
Bokanowsi (Eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (pp. 90–109). London:
International Psyoanalytic Association.
Volkan, V. D. (2010). Psychoanalytic Technique Expanded: A Textbook on
Psychoanalytic Treatment. Istanbul/London: Oa Press.
Volkan, V. D. (2012). e intertwining of the internal and external wars. In: G.
Fromm (Ed.), Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations (pp.
 75–97). London: Karnac.
Volkan, V. D. (2013a). Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War
and Peace. Durham, NC: Pitstone.

Volkan, V. D. (2013b). Father quest and linking objects: A story of the American
World War II Orphans Network (AWON) and Palestinian orphans. In: P. Cohen,
M. Sossin, & R. Ruth (Eds.), Healing in the Wake of Parental Loss: Clinical
Applications and Therapeutic Strategies. New York: Jason Aronson.

Volkan, V. D., & Ast, G. (1994). Spektrum des Narzißmus. Göingen: Vandenhoe &
Rupret.
Volkan, V. D., & Ast, G. (1997). Siblings in the Unconscious and Psychopathology.
Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Volkan, V. D., & Fowler, J. C. (2009). Searching for a Perfect Woman: The Story of a
Complete Psychoanalysis. New York: Jason Aronson.

Volkan, V. D., & Zintl, E. (1993). Life After Loss: The Lessons of Grief. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Volkan, V. D., Ast, G., & Greer, W. (2002). The Third Reich in the Unconscious:
Transgenerational Transmission and its Consequences. New York: Brunner-
Routledge.
Waelder, R. (1936). e principle of multiple function: Observation on over-
determination. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5: 45–62.
Weigert, E. (1967). Narcissism: Benign and malignant forms. In: R. W. Gibson (Ed.),
Crosscurrents in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (pp. 222–238). Philadelphia, PA:
Lippinco.
Wolfenstein, M. (1969). Loss, rage and repetition. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
24: 432–460.
INDEX
aggressive triumphs xiii, 15, 54, 58, 65
Ainslie, R. C. xii
Akhtar, S. 12, 14, 20
Ast, G. xii, xiv–xv, 8, 18, 25, 45
Austen Riggs Center xv, xxi–xxiii
averageness 58
Aynesworth H. 9
Baranger, W. 11
Bataan Death Mar x, xxiii, 4, 26, 30, 57, 66, 75, 77
Berenger, T. 27
Bloom, P. 12
Blos, P. 30
Blue Ridge Hospital 1
Blum, H. 73
Boesky, D. xviii
Bollas, C. xviii, xxii
borderline personality organisation 47, 49
Boyer, L. B. 47
Boyt, G. x
Brenner, I. xv
Bundy, T. 8–9
Bur, D. L. x
Cain, A. C. xii
Cain, B. S. xii
Cameron, N. 45
Camp O’Donnell x–xi
Cooper, A. xviii, 14
countertransference xxiii, xxv, 80
crucial juncture 42, 45, 48–50
Cruise, T. 46
Daedalus 70–71
Dafoe, W. 27
Davoine, F. xxiii, xxv
day residue 27, 67–68
depositing xii, xxiii, 22, 25, 28, 80
Dyess, W. E. x
Ekstein, R. N. 45
Emde, R. 12
emptiness 44
Erikson, E. H. xxi, 30
Erikson Institute xv, xxi
Faimberg, H. xii
Fowler, C. xviii
Freud, A. 30
Freud, S. xviii, 16, 27, 64
Fromm, G. xv, xxi–xxvi
Gaudillière, J. xxiii, xxv
Giovacini, P. 45
grandiose self xvi–xvii, xxii, 13–15, 17, 19, 22–23, 31, 35, 41, 48, 54, 65
Greer, W. xv, 25–26
Hartendorp, A. V. H. x
Heimann, P. xxii
Hewle, F. ix
Hoffman, D. 46
hungry self 13–14, 18, 31, 37, 41, 54, 65
Hussein, S. 53
Icarus 70–71, 76
identification xii, 11, 21, 25, 45, 50
Jacobson, E. xvi
Jefferson. T. 15–16
Jesus 29, 57
Kernberg, O. F. xvi, 13–14, 45, 48, 64
Kestenberg, J. S. xii, xv
Klein, M. xii 48
Knight, R. xxi
Knox, D. x
Kogan, I. xv
Kohut, H. xvi, 13–14
Laub, D. xv
Legg, C. xii
Lehtonen, J. 12
Levinson, B. 46
Levy, S. T. 44
Loewald, H. W. 45
MacArthur, D. ix–x
masoism xvii
mass killer xv
Miaud, S. G. 8
Modell, A. H. 8
mourning xv, 48, 64–66, 73
narcissistic personality organisation xv–xvi, xii, 12, 14–16, 19, 22, 48–49, 54–55
malignant narcissistic xii, xvi, 15, 18
masoistic 14
successful 14
neurotic personality organisation 17, 48
new object 45–46, 49, 64–65
Niederland, W. 41
Novey, S. xxv, 73–74
object relations conflict xvi, 12
observing ego 55
Ogden, T. H. 8
Olini, S. L. 49
Operation Desert Storm 55–56
pilgrimage 74
Podell, D. xv
Poland, W. S. 74,
Poznanski, E. O. xii
projective identification xii
psyoanalysis xviii–xix, xxiv–xxv, 1, 16, 31, 39, 65
evidence-based xxv
growth of pluralism in xviii
preparation for 16
psyological DNA xii
Rangell, L. xvi, xviii
Rapaport, D. xxi, 45
Rapaport, E. A. 16
reaing up xxiii, 47–48
regression,
in the service of the other 49
replacement ild xii, 25
Rudden, M. G. 8
sadism xvii, 6, 15, 56, 58
Saint Joseph xxiii, 29, 57, 64, 74–75
Sandy Hook Elementary Sool xv
Sützenberger, A. A. xii
second look xxv–xxvi, 73–74
Sheen, C. 27
Shengold, L. 40–45
Sheri, I. xii
Sherman, N. xvii
Solyom, A. E. xii
Spitz, R. 13
spliing 49, 55
defensive 13–14, 19, 48
developmental 13
Stern, D. N. 12–13
Stone, M. H. 8–9
Stone, Oliver 27
Straey, J. 45
stranger anxiety 13
Sundelson, D. xviii
superego xii
auxiliary 45
external 47
wartime xxiii, 36
survival guilt 41
Tähkä, V. 45, 64
therapeutic alliance 31
therapeutic regression 44, 54–55
with bodily gestures 51
transference xxiii, xxv, 16–18, 45, 48, 73
 cocoon phase 8, 18
glass bubble 8–9, 18
narcissistic 17, 26–27
trauma xii, xv–xvii, 22, 39–41, 46, 57, 67, 73, 78
transmission of xvii, xxiii, 80
vagina dentata 68
Vietnam War xiv–xv, xxiii, 3, 6, 26, 53
Volkan, V. D. xii–xiii, xv, xviii, xxi–xxvi, 8, 12–14, 17–18, 25, 45, 48, 64, 66, 74
University of Virginia xxvii, 15
Waelder, R. 40
Weigert, E. xvi
Will, O. xxi
Winnico, D. W. xxiii
Wolfenstein, M. 30
Zintl, E. 64