A BODY WITH CHRONIC-FATIGUE-SYNDROME AS A BATTLEGROUND FOR THE FIGHT TO SEPARATE FROM THE MOTHER

I describe the therapy of a 20-year-old woman who believed that her di fficulties in concentrating and remembering were caused by her 'ME' (M yalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS). She had b een fathered by a man who never left his own wife. Work with her dream s revealed a within-body drama in which she was locked in an unspeakab le fight to the death with her mother. Her symptoms improved after par allels between a dream and an accident showed her own self-destructive hand in her story. Another dream, reflecting her first 'incestuous' a ffair, showed her search for her original father-self as someone separ ate from mother, and a later affair provided a between-body drama, hel ping her to own the arrogant and abject traits she had before seen onl y as her mother's. I show how we worked in the area of Winnicott's fir st 'primitive agony' as experienced by a somatizing patient, stuck in a too-close destructive relationship with her mother-body. I discuss h ow analytical work can be done with the primitive affects and conflict s against which the ME symptoms may be defending.