The impact of divorce on a preadolescent girl

This paper presents clinical material from the psychoanalysis of a 12-year-old girl whose parents had divorced several years earlier. Material drawn from her analysis permits us to examine the question: given the intrapsychic demands of the prepubertal period, how was the experience of divorce registered, what aspects of intrapsychic functioning became distorted, and what, if any, remained uncontaminated? The impact of the parental divorce lay in an intensification and entrenchment of characteristic latency defenses which, as puberty approached, contributed to heightened internal conflict and an insistent turn to reality as both explanation for and solution of intrapsychic conflict.