I will love you forever, even if I have never loved you

Abstract

The text describes the implementation of an ongoing psychodynamic-psychogenic psychotherapy started in October 2018 with a now 18-year-old girl (here called Kora) who was sexually abused by her mother’s current husband. Kora begins her therapy in a post-traumatic state. The entire first part of the therapy revolves around restoring her access to the affective and emotional world: she has no connection to feelings and affects, she is a young woman for whom acting out is the way to eliminate, who acts without thinking. In the course of the sessions she manages to access her affective world and to bring out memories and sensations connected to the abuse, to her past, and to her current life. Her thinking ability emerges on the psychotherapeutic stage and the work revolves around integrating this reactivation. This text presents Kora’s therapeutic trajectory, divided by three key moments of essential importance, underlined by the description of three dreams; read and interpreted in view of a particular elaboration of Bion’s psychoanalytic model, called Generative Psychology (Marcoli, 1997). In this model, the psychotherapist puts himself in the position of a symbolic representative of the inner parents: this psychic function aims at caring for the mind – through limitation and protection. The incipient process of internalization of the therapeutic figure as a representative of the parents allows Kora to access generative thinking by asking herself questions that she can pursue in-depth, and by activating herself in her daily life to achieve results and pursue the fulfillment of her desires.