The freezing hands and Reynaud’s syndrome

Fiona is 32 years old and complains of cold hands and feet even during summer. She cannot stand the cold, remembers “always wearing sweaters” and also complains of terrible back pain. She cannot sleep because the bed is cold. Fiona is also depressed and has not been able to succeed professionally. She was diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome and had undergone various treatments with temporary results.

Fiona is very unhappy in her marriage but remains married for fear of being alone. Her husband is an alcoholic and has mistresses, but she feels weak and unable to make decisions to change her life. Her appearance however is strong, muscular and highly masculine. She cannot ever recall wearing a skirt or dress in her life. She had little contact with her mother who abandoned the family when the patient was 7 years old.

Using active imagination the patient worked on the two presenting symbols: constant pain in the back and Reynaud’s syndrome.

Back pain

With her eyes closes Fiona reported the following image:

I am riding a very tall horse. I don’t want to get on the horse but my father is making me do so. I am very afraid. The horse bolts and I hold onto his neck. I feel very frightened.

The patient had completely forgotten this situation. Remembering it, she became very angry with he father and at the same time she felt acute pain in her back and neck. This allowed her to see the clear manifestation of the complex both as an image and a physical pain.

The father always demanded that she be a hero. As the eldest of three children she always had to be the first in all activities. She was a model student and sports player and she worked hard at being first at everything. The father complex was not only locked in the repressed memory and its accompanying emotion but also in the contracted muscle in her back that protected her from a “deadly fall.”

Reynaud’s syndrome

Image:

I am swimming in a frozen lake under the ice. I try to come up but I can’t find a way out. I feel more and more frozen.

During the active imagination the patient became increasingly pale. Her fingers turned light blue. As much as the analyst tried to break the ice nothing seemed to help. In her imagination the patient was suffering and she felt that she could die and saw no way put of this dangerous situation. The analyst began to feel deep cold too and in being on top of the ice felt no way to reach the patient. The analyst decided to move closer to the patient’s hand (without touching) to try and warm her. It turned out to be this heat (love) that would break the ice, the transmitting of warmth, instead of interpretations (more masculine and logical) that only reaffirmed her sense of abandonment and strengthened her positive father complex (positive in the sense that she was extremely linked to her father, trying to imitate him in all possible ways). The feminine, maternal side had been repressed together with ambiguous negative feelings regarding the abandoning mother.

The two organic symptoms are clearly linked with the father and mother complexes. In the shadow, compensating for the efficient, professional, and winning sporty woman, remained the girl almost frozen from lack of affection and warmth. While the back pain expressed the authoritarian, demanding father complex, Reynaud’s syndrome mirrored the coldness of her affective relations, of which the patient was not conscious. In allowing the transcendent function to provide an image of the ice symbol, the patient was able access and express the grief that she had denied herself after her mother’s abandonment. Exercises following this image, where the patient saw herself giving love and warmth to the child of her imagination (shadow), slowly alleviated her symptoms until they were gone.