confirmed it. Abroad, at an international school, he found Western children didn’t
notice his odd looks. He joked, ‘to you, we all look the same anyway’. A gifted child,
Yukio achieved highly at his studies, in sports, and in music. He worked hard to get
to university, have a ‘student life’ and escape from his closed family. Yet, when he
got there, he could not cope. A few weeks into his course he became suicidal.
When I met Yukio, as he was then, he wore shapeless grey clothes. He hid his
squashed face behind thick pebble glasses and lank greasy hair. He hardly made eye
contact. Eighteen, he knew he looked, felt, and behaved like a scared ten-year-old. I
suggested he join a therapy group and, bravely, he did. A year later, he came again.
He wanted to talk about incest with his elder sister, and felt too ashamed to tell the
group.
Trust was extremely hard to create. Gradually he told me about several serious
suicide attempts during his teens, and his ‘loss of face’ at lacking the courage to kill
himself. Eventually, he told the group, learning others had survived similar
experiences. The therapy group were like the gang that supported him during
childhood—his confession was an initiating ritual, and, as he began to feel he
‘belonged’ he began to change. He started dressing like a student, studying, and
playing music again. He graduated and returned to Japan. A few months later he
wrote saying he wanted to come back to England to study music. He’d begun thinking
about having plastic surgery and could he see me? He began analysis using the couch,
three times a week. We’ve now worked together for seven years.
In the transference, I quickly became an idealized ‘good father he’d never had’. He
longed for advice, was furious when I didn’t give it; then, terrified I’d retaliate,
withdrew. He’d lie silent for long periods, facing the wall, hiding his face. He’d make
sobbing movements, but never cried. I asked if he did the same when being whipped.
Yes, crying meant giving in. Together we valued the stubborn courage of the ‘boy
with no face’.
Yukio talked of his desperate longing for ‘a father’, and his envy of the boys in ‘the
gang’ who’d had one. Alas, when he met his real father, he was physically and sexually
abused. Yukio had powerful, distressing, repetitive, ritualized sado-masochistic
memories and sexual fantasies, and despaired of ever having any intimate relationships.
The effect of early experiences of rejection, physical pain, and abuse (in his first
sexual experience) was that he couldn’t imagine sex any other way, nor see himself as
anything but grotesque, ugly, and unlovable. Suffering, and making others suffer,
equalled ‘intimacy’. No experience of others could be symbolic, that is, a bridge
between the known (himself) and the unknown (the other). Psychoanalysts call this
a ‘core complex’ (Glasser 1986). The complex held unbearable murderous wishes
toward his father for abuse and his mother for abandonment. Her inadequacy as
father’s partner and as Yukio’s protector meant he gave her role to his sister.
Using active imagination, we created together the idea that he could become a
‘good father’ to the ‘boy nobody wants’ in himself. He’d imagine what it might be
like to ‘be different’, with a new face. I’d encourage him to visualize this and to talk
to the ‘new face’. As his confidence improved, the ‘new face’ was able to talk with the
child he had been.
206 DALE MATHERS