She had visited the United States previously, and tells me that she is delighted to be able to work with an American psychotherapist who is also a woman.

Margot has been creating and recreating triangular relationships with same-sex partners; a live-in primary partner and a secret lover. She feels alternatively important to both and disrespectful to each. She thinks of one relationship as her reliable family; the other represents freedom.

Margot feels that she is playing a man's game, She has recurrent dreams on this theme. In them, she sees herself as a Nazi officer on a train en route to somewhere.

In her memory of these dreams, she senses that she is an abuser of women. Full of self-loathing, Margot becomes convinced that she has lived a past life as a German officer during WWll. She experiences herself as intrinsically evil and therefore unforgivable. She longs to go to America to escape the ghosts.

Our work together will be to unmask those ghosts, and whatever other mysteries surround Margot's life.

Through dream work and deep relaxation, some remembrances, allusions, and innuendoes emerge. It gradually becomes clear that conversations overheard by Margot as a child, half asleep in her room have claimed a place in her unconscious.

Margot gleans that her French father's political alliance and sympathy had been with the Nazi effort and that this had become the dark, unspoken and carefully guarded family secret.

Unconsciously, she has been paying penance for her father's deeds, burdened by guilt and caught in a rendezvous with his destiny.

Recreating abusiveness, awake and in her dreams, Margot has lived a confused sexual identity. Full of self-hate, she has experienced herself as demonic. Self destructive relationships have only been the signal of her disturbance and the struggle for her soul..

Within the framework of a transpersonal psychotherapy, we were able to free memory and give Margot the opportunity to discover the many ways in which she is different from her father, separate from him and his past.

Our goal became to return "the sins of the father" to the father - clearing the path for Margot to be her own person in her own time and place.

Boundary clarification and individuation, in time, brought relief and an increased capacity for Margot to create a separate and unique identity, free from the ghosts. We witness here the power of family secrets to haunt the next generation; a poignant and dramatic European variation on a universal theme.

Margot's risk to delve into the pain has allowed her to create a present and a future that will not doom her to repeat a distortion of the past - and the reward for her courage to become conscious is freedom.

Elaine Z Mosher PhD

The cases in point which appear in this column do not represent any particular individual or couple, but are a composite representation of people with relevant life issues. Similarities with actual people are coincidental.

©1999 Elaine Mosher

Cases in Point: Archive