From Swan to Ugly Duckling

A 20-year-old woman, whom I will call “Maria,” spent two years under my psychoanalytic care, seeking to better adapt to the demands of the professional and adult life she was entering. She also sought a less anguished approach to dealing with love issues. Maria felt particularly insecure in her emotional life, suspecting that there was something inadequate or flawed in her personality. Consequently, she feared that it was “inevitable that sooner or later” her new boyfriend would end the relationship. The reason for this insecurity came to the fore in the first few months of her analysis, and it was related to her childhood in another country.

Maria’s parents suffered political persecution during the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. Her father was a journalist who had published denunciations of Brazil’s human right violations in European newspapers. Maria’s mother was two months pregnant with Maria when the couple, fearing for their lives, fled the country. After a brief sojourn in France, they were granted political asylum in Sweden. The family was well received by the Swedish authorities, who provided housing and employment.

Maria was born into this new harmonious and secure environment, and there her socialization started. She went to the neighborhood day nursery, then to preschool, and at six-and-a-half-years-old she entered first grade, learning to read and write in Swedish.

When Maria was just over eight years old, her father died. He had not adapted to life away from Brazil and had decided to risk return to his home country. Tragically, in the face of pressure of impending imprisonment and torture, he committed suicide. Understandably, Maria grew up with the idea that the country of her parents, grandparents, and uncles, was an evil and hostile place, which had robbed her of her father. With his demise, Maria’s contact with the Portuguese language of Brazil was restricted to her mother’s tender and loving words.

Life in the Swedish town of Gothenburg was happy in many ways, including one that was very special. Maria has the physical appearance characteristic of the majority ethnicity in Brazil: brown skin and black hair and eyes. Maria reported, however, that she was not regarded by her friends as less Swedish; at school and in the neighborhood she felt accepted as a little brown-skinned Swede. Her differences became positive assets—Maria became very visible, the object of her girlfriends’ admiration and of boys’ interest. Puberty had scarcely begun when Maria was the most sought after: boys vied for the privilege of escorting her home from school.

When Maria was 14, her mother decided to return to Brazil. The military regime had ended, the country was democratic again, and Maria’s mother wanted to rejoin her family and her Brazilian motherland. Back in Rio de Janeiro, Maria was a Brazilian citizen unable to speak the national language except for a few tender and childish expressions. She felt like a Swedish girl but without any Nordic features. Maria was a teenager, on the surface just like all the other Brazilian girls in her new school but without any positive traits that would make her stand out. What did make her different in her classmates’ view was her “strange” manner of speaking Portuguese. But her common physical features and the absence of a foreign accent did not even allow her classification as a foreigner. Soon, Maria felt stigmatized as deficient. In reverse of the children’s story, Maria went from swan in Gothenburg to ugly duckling in Rio.

The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about the “facilitating environment,” an external world that is welcoming enough so that the child develops their affection potential. Maria’s teen years were marked by a regression to the most primitive stages of psychic development in which anxiety and helplessness are the dominating emotions. In her psyche, Brazil was the place of losses: The loss of her father, the loss of her unique appearance, and the loss of fluency in language.

The pain from the loss of such a close person as the father is obvious. No one can replace the dead father. However, in Maria’s “inner world,” there remained the image of a strong and coura-

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geous man, who would provide the psychic support she needed. Consequently, Maria was always trying to fill the space left empty by the death of her father. It is perhaps no accident at the level of her unconscious, that she sought me out as her psychoanalyst because I am a man of her father’s age with the same name.

The other two losses (“the loss of her unique appearance, and the loss of fluency in language”) meant for Maria a further cruel unmaking of her facilitating environment. In Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety (1926), Freud proposes that anxiety results from a feeling of a loss of love. If we interpret this as the case in Maria’s personal crisis, as a loss of a sense of being considered special by the people around her, this is what happened to her when the external environment stopped signaling its approval.

It does not appear appropriate for me to conclude that Maria’s adolescent difficulties are only related to the problems she went through in Brazil. After all, her school environment in Rio de Janeiro was not especially adverse. The radical and negative change of her position in the group—standing out positively in Sweden and feeling invisible in Brazil—was what caused her conflicts in her self-perception and her feelings about how others, even her boyfriend, had perceived her. After a stormy engagement from ages sixteen to eighteen years, during which Maria went through an unending crisis of jealousy, her boyfriend had left her because he could no longer stand her controlling, jealous attitude.

In psychoanalysis Maria developed a new interpretation of her life and a positive self-image. She realized that she had an interesting personal history—that her life in the two countries once again made her different in a positive way. Maria again encouraged young men to seek her out as someone unique and interesting. She once more became a swan, less from her physical features and more for her attitude of facing and overcoming adversity. Today Maria has a new boyfriend, a professor of contemporary history, as well as a host of admirers in the Beaux Arts School she attends. Now it is the young professor who occasionally has fits of jealousy.

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