29 December 1999

Re not taking Zoloft, I said it made me feel for about an hour after taking it that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planters’ punch before lunch in the tropics. I said I’d tried to think this through, because I knew rationally it couldn’t be true, since the PDR said even twice that dose doesn’t reach any effect for several hours and peak effect for 3-5 days of steady dosage. I realized that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well-being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.

I then said that I had tried to think through the anxiety I had expressed at our last meeting. I said that although it had been expressed in terms of work (the meeting in Los Angeles etc.), I realized when I discussed it with you that it was focused on Quintana.

“Of course it was,” he said. We then talked about what my anxieties were re Quintana. Basically, they were that she would become depressed to a point of danger. The shoe dropping, the call in the middle of the night, the attempt to take her emotional temperature on every phone call. I said that in some ways this seemed justified and in other ways unfair to her, because she must be feeling our anxiety as we were feeling hers.

“I suspect she feels your anxiety very particularly,” he said. I said apparently she did. She had not only told us she did but had also mentioned this to Dr. Kass. It was me and not you she wanted to see a psychiatrist. He said he would assume that she read anxiety in both of us, but that something in her and my relationship made her feel mine more acutely, made her lock into mine. “People with certain neurotic patterns lock into each other in a way that people with healthy patterns don’t. There’s clearly a very powerful dependency that goes both ways between you and her.”

He wanted to know how old Quintana was when we got her, the details of the adoption. We talked at some length about that, and I said I had always been afraid we would lose her. Whalewatching. The hypothetical rattlesnake in the ivy on Franklin Avenue. He said that just as all adoptive children have a deep fear that they will be given away again, all adoptive parents have a deep fear that the child will be taken from them. If you don’t deal with these fears at the time you have them, you displace them, obsessively on dangers you can control—the snake in the garden—as opposed to the danger you can’t control. “Obviously, you didn’t deal with this fear at the time. You set it aside. That’s your pattern. You move on, you muddle through, you control the situation through your work and your competency. But the fear is still there, and when you discovered this summer that your daughter was in danger you couldn’t manage or control, the fear broke through your defenses.”

I said I may have been overprotective, but I never thought she saw me that way. In fact, she once described me, as a mother, as “a little remote.”

Dr. MacKinnon: “You don’t think she saw your remoteness as a defense? When she uses remoteness herself as a defense? Didn’t you just tell me? She never looks back?”