Body, destructiveness and symbolization in the analytic treatment with a child. «How do you make a heart out of a stone?»

Abstract

This paper is about the analytical work done with Miguel, a six-year old boy referred by his pediatrician and gastroenterologist for suffering, since he was two, from a psychosomatic eating disorder called rumination or merycism (regurgitation of food from the stomach back up to the mouth to rechew it and swallow it again), with no physiological cause and beginning
to pose a risk of developing esophageal cancer, as well as growth arrest. His narcissistic fragility, his partially cleaved symbolization potential and the need for a reassuring and metabolizing affective containment enabling him to work, in transference, the unswallowable «acid stones» and turn them into heart, affection, food, representations, was the challenge
of our work. I am interested in working, from the privileged position of the transference-countertransference, on the analytical value of an act in the first interview, on its multiple meanings, as a result of the intense mobilization in the analyst of transferences with the parents, as a way of making the analyst feel and understand the vital risk he was at, the intensity of death throes and the care with which we would have to work together. It is also necessary to underline the key role of the analytical work with the parents, in frequent interviews, which enabled opening to other views of Miguel’s pain and its symbolic potentialities. I profoundly appreciate and value their receptiveness and acknowledgement as to the authorization to publish this work, and I share their emotions and their words which express the analytical value of also sharing the written material about the analytical process with Miguel.