Freud in Oceania

Michael (a highly fictionalized/conglomerate but all too real client) was scared as hell and little more than a month away from aging out of the group home he had lived in. At the close of the session he was trembling. I had seen him twice a week for the very first three years of my private practice (many many years ago now) and I had fielded at least as many hours of emergency and crisis phone calls. Hired as an independent contractor by the group home agency, I had watched him, week after week, grow from a gangly coltish boy, into a young self-identified gay man, as tough as he was pretty.

He had no one.
His parents, both severely mentally ill, profoundly sadistic, and long gone. He had lived in an undisputed, unfathomable house of horrors, tortured and feral, until he was removed at age 7. He had then…