2017-11-30
391
Georgia, 42 years old, suffered from recurrent gynaecological infections for many years without her doctors being able to discover their cause. Georgia seemed a princess to the analyst on meeting, her looks young but expressionless. Her beautiful hands looked as if they had never been used and true to form Georgia was born to a wealthy family and had never done any domestic activities. She spent her days reading novels and dreaming that one day a strong man will come and rescue her from her dull life.
Georgia had a terrible fear of dogs and avoided walking in the street in order to avoid them and apart from that she said her life was totally “normal.” She was very religious and went to church every day. Her marriage was “fine” and she only had sexual relations with her husband in order to please him, feeling no pleasure in the activity for herself.
Two sets of images came up from the unconscious during active imagination.
Image 1
A dog is talking to a girl and a strong fat Buddha. The dog asks the Buddha to get out of the doorway of the house so that the girl can come and play with him in the forest. The Buddha says that the girl cannot come out; she has to stay outside praying and meditating.
Image 2
A prostitute, a woman in red, is upset because the priest will not let her enter the church. There is an abandoned baby under a fruit tree. The baby is crying from hunger, but can’t eat the fruit. There are some big insects behind the rock that might attack the baby.
The image sequences show the patient’s father complex (represented by the priest and the Buddha) prevents her from leaving, from going to the forest to play. Here the dog represents her instinctive and sexual life that threatens her, and the girl is her shadow imprisoned by religious authority. Her shadow also appears as a prostitute and abandoned baby.
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In working on the dog symbolism her fantasy was that it would jump panting on her breast, without biting her. With active imagination and amplification the image caused her sexual excitement and left her feeling disorientated. Then she remembered a small dog in her childhood that used to masturbate itself on the furniture and once ejaculated on her leg. Slowly, to her surprise, the patient was able to perceive the sensuality of her own body and many sensations of which she had never been aware.
Many conflicts accompanied the repressed emotions that the transcendent function was allowing her to access, least of all facing the belief systems that came from a highly traditional, strict family and a convenience marriage devoid of love or passion. Her extreme religiosity, she came to understand, was a defence mechanism against her sensuality and eroticism. She took up gardening and got great pleasure from messing with the earth. Two years after the end of her therapy her unexplained gynaecological infections ceased altogether.
