Trying to figure out what her motivations might have been, I asked if she had been ambivalent about seeing Sylvia, or resentful about her not paying. She said, "Not at all. I enjoyed seeing her." When I asked Ruth how she felt about Sylvia, she reluctantly admitted that she loved her. And it appears that the feelings were mutual. Sylvia wrote admiringly about Ruth in her journal, noting how much she looked forward to seeing her. She writes, "I believe in R.B. because she is a clever woman who knows her business & I admire her. She is for me a permissive mother figure, I can tell her anything, and she won't turn a hair or scold or withhold her listening, which is a pleasant substitute for love." It appears that Sylvia either didn't realize, or couldn't bear to admit, that Ruth actually loved her.

What distinguishes a psychoanalytic treatment from other forms of therapy is that the patient forms an attachment with the analyst, then "transfers" early fears, longings, anger and other feelings onto her, and this transference is analyzed. This takes the form of the analyst exploring the patient's feelings toward her. This apparently did not occur in Sylvia's treatment. So I asked Ruth: "Did you encourage Sylvia to talk about her feelings toward you?" Surprisingly, she said that she did not. She focused on Sylvia's feelings about her mother, Ted and other important people in her life.

Clearly, Ruth was not comfortable being the object of Sylvia's intense feelings. Ruth gave Sylvia permission to hate her mother but not permission to express either love or hate toward her. Sylvia's self-report suggests that neither was comfortable talking about their relationship -- "am very ashamed to tell her of immediate jealousies; the result of my extraprofessional fondness for her, which has inhibited me."

Had Sylvia stayed in treatment longer, perhaps they would have eventually gotten there. But Sylvia and Ted decided in January 1959 to return to England by the end of the year, though Sylvia was still very much involved in her sessions with Ruth. Ruth told me that she thought Ted had pressured her to go. I asked her if she had ever met Ted, and she said, "Oh, yes. I had tea with them at their apartment."

"During the treatment?" I asked.

She said yes, that this had occurred several times. I asked if she had concerns about seeing Sylvia outside of the office. "No, it was only tea," she said and admitted she was curious about Ted and wanted to meet him. Initially, she found him charming and handsome, as Sylvia had. But, over time, she came to dislike him intensely and felt that Sylvia had made a bad choice.

I again asked if she had reservations about Sylvia moving back to England. Not only was her therapy incomplete, but she was about to leave the country with a man Ruth believed was not a good person or husband. She reiterated that it was not her place to question Sylvia's decisions. "Besides," she said, "she was pregnant by that time." On Feb. 28, 1958, a month after making the decision, Sylvia wrote in her journal, "Nightmare before going to R.B. this week: train broke down in subway in a fire of blue sparks, got on wrong track, driving in old car with Ted, drove into deep snowdrift and the car fell apart, struggled to a telephone after 11, her maid answered, and I felt she was home, either knowing this would happen and thus not coming out, or pretending she wasn't home. Relived with all the emotion the episode at the hospital in Carlisle. Murderous emotions in a child can't be dealt with through reason, in an adult they can."

I read this passage aloud to Ruth and asked her if she recalled the dream and what she thought. She seemed quite upset when I read it to her. Sylvia's feelings of being abandoned by Ruth, of being on the "wrong track," of looming disaster with Ted, and of receiving poor treatment, were painfully obvious in her dream. After a long pause, Ruth told me she had no recollection of ever being told of that dream. If she had, she thinks she most certainly would have discussed its meaning with Sylvia, especially her reservations about the impending move and her murderous rage, presumably at Ruth. Still shaken, she repeated, "I don't remember her telling me that dream. And if she did, I missed it."

I wondered if somehow Ruth was reenacting aspects of her own life with Sylvia. So I asked her about her relationship with her mother. But Ruth could not talk about her mother. Almost every time I asked, she changed the subject to her father.

Ruth spoke frankly with me about her early life and her father. A brilliant, handsome and famous minister, Donald Grey Barnhouse was a charismatic speaker and admitted snob. Raising his children in Europe, often speaking French at home, and looking down on those less intelligent and well bred. He totally dominated his wife and Ruth grew up in terrible awe of him. "He was a very important person," she said.

All the children had high IQs. Ruth's was 220 and when she was 14 her father wanted her to start at Vassar. She was accepted but told to wait until she was 16 to begin her studies. In the meantime she became involved with her first husband, Francis Edmonds, who was a student at Princeton. They met in a religious youth group and fell in love. Her father refused to consent and demanded that she stop seeing him. Ruth tried to strike a bargain with her father that involved her waiting to marry, but he insisted that the relationship be broken off. I asked her why she thought her father was so opposed to her involvement with Edmonds. If she agreed to wait for marriage, why couldn't she still see him? Ruth replied, "Oedipal-shmoedipal, I guess," and we both laughed.

Recent Stories