Would-Be Wife Killer: A Clinical Study of Primitive Mental Functions, Actualised Unconscious Fantasies, Satellite States, and Developmental Steps

165 Pages·2015·0.794 MB·English

by  Vamik D. Volkan

WOULD-BE WIFE KILLER

WOULD-BE WIFE KILLER
A Clinical Study of
Primitive Mental Functions,
Actualised Unconscious
Fantasies,
Satellite States, and
Developmental Steps
Vamık D. Volkan
First published in 2015 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2015 by Vamık D. Volkan
The right of Vamık D. Volkan to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-279-0
Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii
ABOUT THIS BOOK ix
CHAPTER ONE
A beginning therapist meets a would-be wife murderer 1
CHAPTER TWO
A man with three penises and two vaginas 11
CHAPTER THREE
My first three months with Attis 23
CHAPTER FOUR
A childhood injury to a body part that stands for a penis and
actualised unconscious fantasy 33
CHAPTER FIVE
Thoughts on personality organisations 47
v
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER SIX
The psychotic core 57
CHAPTER SEVEN
Beginning outpatient therapy 65
CHAPTER EIGHT
Linking interpretations, a flesh-coloured car,
and emotional flooding 75
CHAPTER NINE
Turkey dinners and identification with
a therapeutic libidinal object 83
CHAPTER TEN
Internalisation–externalisation cycles and the
alteration of the psychotic core 89
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Workable transference 99
CHAPTER TWELVE
Satellite state and therapeutic play 107
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Crucial juncture experiences 117
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Physical illnesses and psychic freedom 125
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sunset 131
REFERENCES 135
INDEX 147
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the
University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia; an
emeritus training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Washington
Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, D.C.; and the Senior Erik Erikson
Scholar at the Erikson Institute for Education and Research of the
Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He served as the
Medical Director of the University of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital
and the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of
Mind and Human Interaction. He is a past president of the International
Society of Political Psychology, the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, the
Turkish-American Neuropsychiatric Association, and the American
College of Psychoanalysts. He holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from
Kuopio University, Finland (now called University of Eastern Finland);
from Ankara University, Turkey; and from Eastern Psychoanalyti-
cal University, St. Petersburg, Russia. He served as a member of the
Carter Center’s International Negotiation Network, headed by former
president Jimmy Carter. He was an Inaugural Yitzak Rabin Fellow,
Rabin Center for Israeli Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel; a Visiting Professor
of Law, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts; a Visiting Pro-
fessor of Political Science, the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
vii
viii ABOUT THE AUTHOR
and Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey; and a Visiting Professor
(cid:726)
of Psychiatry, Ankara University, Ankara, Ege University, Izmir and
Cerrahpasa Medical Faculty, Istanbul, Turkey. He chaired the Select
(cid:726)
Advisory Commission to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1996
Critical Incident Response Group; was a Temporary Consultant to the
World Health Organization in Albania and Macedonia; and a Fulbright
Scholar in Austria. Dr. Volkan received the Nevitt Sanford Award from
the International Society of Political Psychology, the Max Hayman
Award from the American Orthopsychiatric Association, the L. Bryce
Boyer Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology, the
Margaret Mahler Literature Prize from the Margaret Mahler Founda-
tion, Best Teaching Award from the American College of Psychoana-
lysts, and the Sigmund Freud Award given by the city of Vienna in
collaboration with the World Council of Psychotherapy. He has been
nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-2000s and
in 2014 with letters of support from twenty-seven countries for exam-
ining conflicts between opposing large groups, carrying out projects
in various troubled spots in the world for thirty years, and develop-
ing psychopolitical theories. At present he is the president of Interna-
tional Dialogue Initiative, a non-profit organisation that brings together
unofficial representatives from various parts of the world, including
Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States,
and West Bank to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical angle.
He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of dozens of books, and
has served on the editorial boards of sixteen national or international
professional journals. He lectures internationally.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book tells the story of a man who became my patient soon after I
began my psychiatric residency training over five and a half decades
ago. The evening before I met him for the first time he had attempted to
chop off his wife’s head with an axe, but stopped himself from becom-
ing a murderer by entering a catatonic state. He was then a thirty-
nine-year-old Methodist minister and I was fourteen years his junior.
For nearly five years I saw him every workday during his first three-
month-long hospitalisation, during a second hospitalisation of over a
month’s duration, and then once a week as an outpatient. Following
this treatment period I moved to a new location nearly 300 miles away
from him, but since I believed that he needed further psychotherapy,
I gave him the name of a psychiatrist who had an office not far away
from where he lived. He refused to see my colleague, however, and
instead drove to my new place and continued to see me once a month
for some years. Gradually, he came less frequently—four to six times a
year for a decade or so and then once or twice a year—until his physical
health started to decline when he was in his mid-seventies. Although I
did not see him after this, we spoke on the phone several times before
he died in his early eighties. By giving details of my understanding of
ix