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Notes

We psychoanalysts, I believe, are always interested in the course of our patients’ lives. Sometimes we are lucky enough to hear from a family member or even, as Freud did, to meet up with our patient again. When Little Hans was nineteen years old, he introduced himself to Freud as the boy whose infantile neurosis was the subject of Freud's 1909 paper. Freud was impressed by the youth and amazed that Hans remembered almost nothing about the events from his childhood that had led his father to seek help for his phobic four-year-old son.

Several years ago, I was at a movie theater when a man called out “Dr. Karush.” He turned out to be the father of a former child analytic patient, and he appeared delighted to give me an unsolicited report on his now grown-up son.

In this case, I had asked the patient about how she might feel if her mother wanted to continue to talk to me even if she did not. She expressed both positive and negative feelings about her mother seeing me. She expressed the feeling that her mother had always been in competition for my attention and that, in a way, her mother was stealing me or breaking the rules of the game. On balance, though, she, as a teenager, believed it would be beneficial for both of them if her mother continued to meet with me.

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Ruth K. Karush

Dr. Karush is Dean of Education, the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Training and Supervising Analyst in Adult, Child, and Adolescent Analysis, the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She is also Past President of The Association for Child Psychoanalysis.