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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO430

On Not Choosing: Living More Than One Life

ON NOT CHOOSING: LIVING MORE THAN ONE LIFE

Leading a double life can be understood not merely as infidelity, but as a repetition of an unresolved relationship with a parent and an attempt to keep different parts of the self alive.

This case aims to explore the emotional and unconscious meanings of leading a double life in a patient who has a long-term affair despite describing her marriage as loving and secure. The method is a psychodynamic single-case study; the formulation draws on psychoanalytic concepts such as repetition, splitting, identification, and transference/countertransference, as well as Adam Phillips's concept of the unlived life; the poster states that the material has been de-identified. In the clinical context, the 35-year-old female patient is distressed by her relationship with a considerably older man, which evokes intense longing and difficulty separating. Prominent developmental themes include an emotionally unavailable, demanding, and difficult-to-read father figure whose intermittent affection was nevertheless deeply soothing; the father's move abroad and the subsequent discovery that he had another family; and persistent longing, feelings of exclusion, and a wish to be valued. The relational formulation notes that the lover increasingly resembles the father in his speech, manner, and emotional availability; that a cycle of longing, uncertainty, testing, a desire to be chosen, and fear of loss is at work; and that the patient's own double life echoes her father's. The working hypothesis involves repetition, identification, and an attempt at retrospective reparation, organized around the positions of an abandoned daughter seeking an unavailable father and a father leading a divided life. During the therapeutic process, a four-day mismatch between the psychiatrist's leave and the patient's planned discharge was addressed as an enactment. The patient's wish to leave the decision to the psychiatrist was declined, and she chose to be discharged as planned; sadness, hopelessness, sympathy, and frustration emerged in the countertransference. The clinical implication is that insight alone does not bring resolution, and that therapy offers a space in which the dynamics of repetition can be recognized and the capacity to choose gradually reclaimed. Note: the poster narrative identifies the parent who leads a double life and has another family as the father; the congress abstract identifies this figure as the mother. The poster has been used as the basis here.

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