The Psychic Warrior: Where are you mummy?

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The next slide shows the therapist wrapped up in bandages and saying to a chair which has been knocked over, ‘wrapping me up in bandages doesn’t make me your mummy does it Mr Jones? ….Mr Jones?’  Clearly the therapist doesn’t know that Mr Jones has disappeared. The idea of the therapist being dressed as a mummy is a play on the idea of even a male therapist being experienced in the transference potentially as a mother figure or a mummy. 

If we take Mr Jones’ early idealised relationship with his mother which has been revealed and interrupted by the therapist’s exploration he may want to attack the therapist for taking her away or indeed may show the therapist some of his own more hidden hostile feelings towards his mother in attacking the therapist. Any attack on the therapist in the present may be an aspect of a transfer of feelings from the past relationship into the present. Any damage that was felt to have been done to the early figure may be repeated in the present so that there is a kind of echo of damage to the past object in the present.

It is often the case that when somebody is in an idealised loving relationship with somebody they don’t want to recognise the more hateful or hostile feelings towards that person and this may apply in the transference. The patient may well wish to attack or damage the therapist and may well take flight from these feelings of a wish to retaliate to protect the therapist, hence in this cartoon Mr Jones has ‘disappeared’.