WOULD-BE WIFE KILLER WOULD-BE WIFE KILLER A Clinical Study of Primitive Mental Functions, Actualised Unconscious Fantasies, Satellite States, and Developmental Steps Vamık D. Volkan First published in 2015 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2015 by Vamık D. Volkan The right of Vamık D. Volkan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-279-0 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii ABOUT THIS BOOK ix CHAPTER ONE A beginning therapist meets a would-be wife murderer 1 CHAPTER TWO A man with three penises and two vaginas 11 CHAPTER THREE My first three months with Attis 23 CHAPTER FOUR A childhood injury to a body part that stands for a penis and actualised unconscious fantasy 33 CHAPTER FIVE Thoughts on personality organisations 47 v vi CONTENTS CHAPTER SIX The psychotic core 57 CHAPTER SEVEN Beginning outpatient therapy 65 CHAPTER EIGHT Linking interpretations, a flesh-coloured car, and emotional flooding 75 CHAPTER NINE Turkey dinners and identification with a therapeutic libidinal object 83 CHAPTER TEN Internalisation–externalisation cycles and the alteration of the psychotic core 89 CHAPTER ELEVEN Workable transference 99 CHAPTER TWELVE Satellite state and therapeutic play 107 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Crucial juncture experiences 117 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Physical illnesses and psychic freedom 125 CHAPTER FIFTEEN Sunset 131 REFERENCES 135 INDEX 147 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia; an emeritus training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, D.C.; and the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute for Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He served as the Medical Director of the University of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital and the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction. He is a past president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, the Turkish-American Neuropsychiatric Association, and the American College of Psychoanalysts. He holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from Kuopio University, Finland (now called University of Eastern Finland); from Ankara University, Turkey; and from Eastern Psychoanalyti- cal University, St. Petersburg, Russia. He served as a member of the Carter Center’s International Negotiation Network, headed by former president Jimmy Carter. He was an Inaugural Yitzak Rabin Fellow, Rabin Center for Israeli Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel; a Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts; a Visiting Pro- fessor of Political Science, the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria vii viii ABOUT THE AUTHOR and Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey; and a Visiting Professor (cid:726) of Psychiatry, Ankara University, Ankara, Ege University, Izmir and Cerrahpasa Medical Faculty, Istanbul, Turkey. He chaired the Select (cid:726) Advisory Commission to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1996 Critical Incident Response Group; was a Temporary Consultant to the World Health Organization in Albania and Macedonia; and a Fulbright Scholar in Austria. Dr. Volkan received the Nevitt Sanford Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, the Max Hayman Award from the American Orthopsychiatric Association, the L. Bryce Boyer Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology, the Margaret Mahler Literature Prize from the Margaret Mahler Founda- tion, Best Teaching Award from the American College of Psychoana- lysts, and the Sigmund Freud Award given by the city of Vienna in collaboration with the World Council of Psychotherapy. He has been nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-2000s and in 2014 with letters of support from twenty-seven countries for exam- ining conflicts between opposing large groups, carrying out projects in various troubled spots in the world for thirty years, and develop- ing psychopolitical theories. At present he is the president of Interna- tional Dialogue Initiative, a non-profit organisation that brings together unofficial representatives from various parts of the world, including Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and West Bank to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical angle. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of dozens of books, and has served on the editorial boards of sixteen national or international professional journals. He lectures internationally. ABOUT THIS BOOK This book tells the story of a man who became my patient soon after I began my psychiatric residency training over five and a half decades ago. The evening before I met him for the first time he had attempted to chop off his wife’s head with an axe, but stopped himself from becom- ing a murderer by entering a catatonic state. He was then a thirty- nine-year-old Methodist minister and I was fourteen years his junior. For nearly five years I saw him every workday during his first three- month-long hospitalisation, during a second hospitalisation of over a month’s duration, and then once a week as an outpatient. Following this treatment period I moved to a new location nearly 300 miles away from him, but since I believed that he needed further psychotherapy, I gave him the name of a psychiatrist who had an office not far away from where he lived. He refused to see my colleague, however, and instead drove to my new place and continued to see me once a month for some years. Gradually, he came less frequently—four to six times a year for a decade or so and then once or twice a year—until his physical health started to decline when he was in his mid-seventies. Although I did not see him after this, we spoke on the phone several times before he died in his early eighties. By giving details of my understanding of ix