(At the time he wrote it, he was undergoing both individual and group counseling.)

"Most of my life I have felt pushed and pulled. My father pushed me into school, sports, and so forth, and over the years my resentment grew for him, as he was always directing and controlling my life and beating me when I challenged his authority. My mother always gave me a warm, unconditional love and tried to pull me under her protective wing, which is something I have always resisted.

My parents divorced when I was 16, and without parental control I began a life of permissiveness in my relationships with women and in my use of psychedelic drugs and marijuana.

On graduating from college, I rejected my father's wishes to pursue a career and returned to school to seek another degree. In some ways it's just a place to be that I like. Most of my life revolves around living for today, a hedonistic style that has no concreteness of goals and aspirations, with a lack of definition of `what a man should be.'

I float in and out of people's lives. They see an image of me as a despoiler of women, a drug freak, and a cold bastard. My fear is that I am nothing more than that image, that I am empty inside. I want to be able to open up and let people see the warmer, more sensitive sides of me, but I have terrible difficulty doing that. I have a strong need to become close and intimate with others, yet I never let myself become vulnerable because I fear being dependent on them and trapped by their love."

How would you work with Jack? (Answer these 5 questions...please number your answers!!!!)

Assume that Jack comes to you for personal counseling and that all you know about him is what he wrote.

Answer the following 5 questions on how you might proceed with Jack within a psychoanalytic frame of reference: Make sure to answer all parts of each question to get full credit.

1 Do you think that Jack's current unwillingness to become vulnerable to others out of his fear of "being dependent on them and trapped by their love" has much to do with his mother's unconditional love?

2. Was his mother's "warm, unconditional love" really without conditions? What do you suppose her conditions were for keeping Jack "under her protective wing?" How might this experience be related to his relationships with women now?

3. Jack describes his father as an authoritarian, controlling, and cruel man who apparently had conventional ideas of what he wanted Jack to become. What are the underlying psychological aspects that you see involved with Jack's rejection of his father's wishes? How might you explain the fact that in many ways he became what his father did not want him to become?

4. How might you work with Jack's fear that he is nothing more than a "despoiler of women," "a drug freak," and a "cold bastard?"

5. How might you explain Jack's fear that he is "empty inside"? What are some possible causes of his feelings of emptiness? How would you work on this issue with him?