When she was six years old, Emma F. fell in love with her Year 2 teacher, Miss King. Miss King wore shiny hoop earrings and bright red nail polish. She and Emma shared a fascination with fossils. Once, Emma told Miss King that she was reading Charlotte’s Web all over again, and Miss King squeezed Emma’s hand – it was one of her favourite books too.
Before breakfast, on the last Saturday of the school year, Emma sat down at the kitchen table to make a thank-you card for Miss King. She drew a picture of an ammonite on the front, then opened the card and wrote: ‘Dear Miss King, you are the best teacher ever. Thank you for being my teacher. I will miss you next year. I love you more than anyone even Mummy. Love, Emma xxxxx’
When her father sat down, Emma showed him the card. ‘You can’t say that you love Miss King more than you love Mummy,’ he told her. ‘It’s not true.’ Emma took a pink rubber from her pencil case and began to erase the last sentence of her note. Her father stopped her. ‘I can still read what you wrote,’ he said. ‘You need to make a new card.’ And it was because of this – because he didn’t want any trace of her words to remain – that Emma knew she’d done something truly wrong.
Emma soon forgot about her card and the exchange with her father. But twenty-three years later, she remembered it, during a psychoanalytic session.
That morning, Emma had been late to meet her boyfriend, Mark, for coffee. Soon after she arrived, they got into an argument about Emma’s relationship with her friend Phoebe. Mark insisted it made no sense for Emma to keep seeing her friend; Phoebe always made her feel bad about herself.
‘He doesn’t understand why I like her,’ she told me later. ‘He says I’m always down after I see her.’
‘Are you?’ I asked.
‘Mark says I am.’
‘I’m not asking what Mark thinks you feel. I’m trying to figure out with you what you feel.’
‘He must be right – why would he lie?’
And it was then, when I didn’t immediately answer, that she remembered Miss King.
I’d been treating Emma for almost a year. She’d first come to see me because she’d become acutely depressed after beginning a PhD. She’d been prescribed antidepressants. Her psychiatrist asked me to see her after she told him that she was longing to talk to someone – ‘to break through the wall that keeps me from living’.
In our first sessions, Emma described her childhood as normal, happy. But slowly, over the following months, another story surfaced. Emma’s father was frequently away for work; her mother was insecure, unsure of herself. They quarrelled frequently. Just before Emma’s sister was born, Emma was sent to Scotland, to her grandmother’s, where she stayed for six or seven months. Without emotion Emma described returning to her parents and new baby sister, and how she missed her grandmother and cried for her at night, ‘My parents have this funny story about how, when I came home, I insisted on calling my mum “lady” – I wouldn’t call her “Mummy”.’
As best I could tell, Emma’s parents’ self-esteem, their emotional equilibrium, seemed dependent on Emma behaving, achieving.
Events in Emma’s early life that would ordinarily have caused a child anxiety – the first day of nursery, being forgotten outside school at pick-up time, getting lost in a department store – seemed not to have bothered her at all. My suspicion was that Emma feared being sent away again if she allowed herself to feel her own feelings. And while Emma’s skill in fitting in with her parents’ wishes did not prevent the development of her substantial intellectual abilities, it did stop her emotional development.
When Emma’s PhD supervisor asked her to choose between two different areas of research, to tell him which area she wished to pursue and why – Emma broke down. Having to choose a direction, she had no compass, she was lost.
In the quiet of the consulting room, Emma asked, ‘Why do you think I’m remembering Miss King’s card now?’
‘Why do you think?’
‘I don’t know. The conversation with my dad was like the conversation with Mark – both were telling me what I really feel, or should feel.’
Emma said that she didn’t understand how people knew what they really felt. ‘Most of the time, I don’t know what I feel. I figure out what I should feel and then just act that way.’
I started to point out to Emma that she did know where to look: her own memories, dreams, actions. Her memory of her father came to mind as we were talking about her argument with Mark – the two events felt similar to her. And in telling me that she was late again to meet Mark, she was signalling to us both her lack of enthusiasm for seeing him. But as I tried to explain my thoughts, Emma began to cry.
‘Miss King,’ she said, sobbing. ‘Miss King.’
Later Emma would tell me that she didn’t know why remembering that morning in the kitchen had made her so upset, so overemotional. ‘Mum hates self-pity,’ she said. I told her that I didn’t think it was self-pity; it was sadness. She seemed to be crying for the self she’d lost, grieving for the little girl who wasn’t allowed to have her feelings.