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CASE HISTORIES
Andrei
is 10 and lives in an orphanage after being
picked up by the police for violent behaviour.
His father has been in and out of prison; his
mother is frightened of her husband and feels
helpless to bring up her son. Andrei both fears
and admires his father, who sneers at him for
becoming a sissy and boasts that he alone can
make a ‘real man’ of him. The boy’s behaviour
has been so disturbed that the orphanage workers
hesitate to let him mix with the other children.
Yet his mother, who works night-shifts, cannot
muster the resources to take him home. It is
vital that Andrei learns to relate to people
other than through violence. With the help of
his male psychotherapist, he is experiencing
that there are different ways of ‘being a man’
and that there is nothing shameful in being
cared for.
Olga
is 14, brought by her parents to a
psychotherapist because ‘she won’t do as she is
told’ and ‘won’t interact with other children’.
In the course of therapy, it quickly emerged
that she has little chance to do anything else.
Her mother, burdened by pressure from her own
parents and angry with her quiescent husband,
demands that Olga spends all her time either
working on school assignments or attending the
many extra classes for which her parents pay.
The family flat allows no privacy and Olga’s
mother makes sure she doesn’t dawdle between
school and home. Gradually, the
psychotherapist, through work with the whole
family, is helping this ‘too-good’ child to
enjoy her own teenage life, her mother to relax
her demanding vigilance and her father to
participate in his daughter’s upbringing.
Tania
is 30 years old, the only daughter of a mother
ravaged by depression and a father who died of
alcoholism. Since she was a young girl, Tania
has felt responsible for not just her parents
but her grandparents, for whom she often had to
care. She still lives with her mother, for like
most young adults she has not been able to
afford a place of her own. When she came into
therapy three years ago, she had little sense of
herself as an independent woman or hope for a
decent livelihood. Now, she has found herself a
good job which she enjoys, a loving boyfriend
and the possibility of a place to live. She
longs to move out, but remains fearful of the
possible consequences for her mother and of
leaving the only security she herself knows; she
has developed severe eczema and panic attacks.
Yet through working with her female
psychotherapist, she is also beginning to
believe that she can establish a more hopeful
life for herself and her future children.
Pavel
is 29, an only child whose parents divorced
when he was five. His mother died of
tuberculosis shortly afterwards. He was brought
up by his kindly father and a strict and rigid
stepmother who demanded obedience and respect.
His father earned little; in the small family
flat, father and son shared a bedroom. As a boy,
Pavel was a loner. Often beaten and bullied by
the neighbourhood children, he felt ashamed and
helpless, and had to endure his stepmother’s
anger and scorn. She cajoled him into the army
‘to make a man of him’. But his career ended
ignominiously when he was dishonourably
discharged for cowardice under fire. Through the
concern of a colleague at work, Pavel met a male
psychotherapist who is now helping him to
communicate about his distress, his painful
experiences and his difficulties in growing into
manhood – in words instead of simply through
actions.
*Names and details have been changed to protect
anonymity |
