Philippe Servais – Paris

ADAMAS

As I have said earlier, I would like to present you with a case that is interesting to see in comparison with the last one. She is a lady of sixty, teaching sociology at university and married to one of the biggest intellectuals in France. She came to see me six years ago with some problems of circulation in her lower body: oedema in the ankles, very bad blood circulation, the legs always heavy and haemorrhoids. Besides that, she has a depression for the last fifteen years although she takes antidepressors on a regular basis. She follows psychoanalysis for sixteen years.

She lived in another country with her first husband who cherished her. He spent a lot of time with her, looked after her career, her well-being, waited on her hand and foot and, apart from a few little health problems, she was well. Twelve years ago she had what she calls her grand revolution, in other words she fell in love with the man she lives with at the moment. So she started another life and left her country. She found an equivalent job and is now a university professor. But she still feels uprooted although she travels a lot and every two months she goes back to her country. She has enough money and doesn’t want for anything. But after the divorce she stayed emotionally very dependent on her ex-husband, who remained friends with her, although it was she who broke the marriage. He still waits on her hand and foot. She phones him three times a week telling him about her life and he is always ready to put her up when she comes back into the country.

“My husband used to protect me and I am missing that protection. He was a mother to me, not a father but a mother. I am an abandoned child”. She is sixty and a university professor of sociology! “When he was with me, I could do what I wanted to do. I could go to conferences abroad, he was there”. Well, the new husband is a very different man, not at all the protective type. He in turn has an ex-wife with whom he stays in contact because of the children but their relationship is not the same. It is a normal relationship between two people after an amicable divorce.

She is very jealous of that. They lived a great passion at the beginning. He found in her a lovely woman who was on the same wavelength, both professors at university.

“A big subject in my life,” she tells me, “is the house, the cocoon the home. I love being at home, I don’t really like travelling. I hated being uprooted like that”. But I sense that it is wrong. I feel that these are statements of an intellectual person who has been psychoanalysed and tries to justify her disorder.

“ I am”, she continues, “a herd animal, a family animal. I don’t have my family anymore and I have a pathological need for friends”. So, she organises quite a lot of dinner parties. “I am scared to death of loneliness, I am permanently worried about my own children (who are fine). I have phantasms of misery, of lacking, of being on the street”, which I feel is impossible in her case! She comes from an aristocratic family, a bit decadent. When she was small, she used to ride around the grounds of the family castle. “I can’t stand suffering. If you knew, Doctor, how much I suffer for the others…That is why I give to charity and if I have studied sociology it is because so much humanity makes me suffer”. But I don’t believe that! There is an article in Paris-Match in my waiting room and she is telling me, tears in her eyes, about vivisection in order to prove her compassion to me! She is virtually fainting because she is thinking of the vivisection! As far as I am concerned she leaves me ice cold!

What we retain from this is that she needs to be surrounded all the time; that she feels abandoned, alone. She continuously has to have friends around her. Her friend at present, a very busy man, does not do everything he should do, far from it; amongst other things he moans when at four o’clock in the morning she wakes him up because she can’t sleep anymore saying to him: “I can’t sleep anymore” and he tells her off. She tells me that last month she had a phone bill of 1300 dollars because she phones everybody including friends in her own country. She tells me something interesting: “I consume friendships in order to be reassured”. I say to her:

How do you mean?

I have friends come and go and I make new ones again.

This means, she uses them, she sucks the marrow from their bones, and she takes their love. She also confesses that she has had a number of lovers, an obvious sign of her need to be loved. “My companion does not adore me to the extent my ex-husband used to. The other day I started crying because a girlfriend did not follow my advice”.

Knowing that a professor at university can’t be given notice, she only gives a few lessons and doesn’t do anything anymore. She stopped her research work as well. She tells me things about herself that only people that have done psychoanalysis dare talk about without scruples: “I am obsessed by having to be the Queen and if I am not, I get very despondent. I organise my subjects around me”. She is all the same a bit cynical because she is very conscious of herself. “I have to be the centre of attraction. I don’t accept that my husband shows signs of old age”. I won’t tell you how many face-lifts she has had.

With her hyper-jealousy, she torments her husband and even her ex-husband! (She is also jealous of their friends). “And I must say that he has always been faithful to me. I couldn’t say the same thing about myself…With my ex-husband (he has become the ideal man now), I had found a mother and a family. But already from the beginning of the marriage the relationship wasn’t based on sex. He was like a mother to me and you don’t make love to your mother! If a friend stops to phone me I get very upset with her. If a friend suddenly shows interest in somebody else, I can’t take it and I drop her”. She spends her time suspecting her husband of cheating on her, which is not the case. She tried to throw his children out. She can’t stand them and she wants her husband to have nothing to do with them anymore. Not really very pleasant, this woman!

At one stage, she starts the sentence by saying:

When my husband left me ...

Wait, it was you who left!

Oh yes, it was I. I really trusted him completely, Doctor, and you know what he did after I left him? He found another women!

By the way, she blames her new husband for being narcissistic (sic)!

She dreams that she is being abandoned. She also has fits of bulimia. She stays at home and waits for others to do things for her or to take her out. “They call me the mole”. She controls everything from her mole heap, she knows what her husband is doing, his timetable etc., but she also knows what her grown up children are doing – they are thirty and thirty-three! – though they live abroad. “I control everything, I know everything about them. I know if they enjoy their lovemaking or not. I know their social life, their friends. I have to know everything about them. I ask my son on the phone about his hairstyle. In any case with my ex-husband I was the boss. I am a real snob”. She considers the social level as being very important and the reason she does not take her pension is only because she wants to retain her status, “otherwise I would tell them to get lost. My work doesn’t interest me in the slightest.”

One day she arrives with a bad laryngitis which had been bothering her for the last fifteen days, a laryngo-tracheitis, which she cannot shake off. She took antibiotics and several other things, nothing works. She has a fit of coughing during the consultation. So, I think to myself: she is a pain in the neck, I have not found her remedy and on top of it I will not even be able to find the remedy for her laryngitis. It is a catastrophe, this is going to be the last consultation, and I will not see her again! In the middle of her coughing, she tells me:

You know I am very frustrated.

Frustrated about what?

- I am frustrated about not being marvellous, the most beautiful and the most appreciated.

And she repeats that she wants to be the centre of the universe.

Last night, for instance, I cooked a dinner at home (a nice dinner with crystal etc., obviously I had remarkable, extraordinary people), but I am upset and depressed because …

Didn’t it go well?

Oh yes, I think it went very well, my friend even congratulated me, which is rare. But I realise that I was not the best and most brilliant. What would really make me happy would be that my companion gave me compliments all he time. (She tells me all this without being embarrassed). I find it difficult to take over the conversation during a dinner and that makes me sick.

And as she tells me the story, she has another terrible fit of coughing. She adds: “You know, Doctor, I think I really don’t deserve a lot but I so badly want to be a star”. This remark helps me to find the remedy.

A speaker: Is she beautiful?

Philippe Servais: For a woman of sixty, she is fine, she is attractive…

A speaker: Platina?

Philippe Servais: I didn’t feel it was Platina but I thought of it.

A speaker: Anantherum ?

Philippe Servais: Anantherum has a particular possessiveness.

A speaker: A spider?

Philippe Servais: She hasn’t got the craftiness of a spider either: she is a bit rough, “ I have to be the most beautiful, I have to be loved”. To get what she wants she doesn’t use a strategy like the spider does. With her it has to happen immediately.

A speaker: Hyoscyamus ?

Philippe Servais: It is not Hyoscyamus but it is true that there is the “control” of Hyoscyamus, the need to control his universe and to keep in contact.

A speaker: Sulphur?

Philippe Servais: She is quite lucid. She is not really in the illusion. I think that she is a bit unpolished.

A speaker: You want to say “mineral”?

Philippe Servais: Yes, I believe it is mineral. That is why I wanted to compare this case with the last one because I thought of Palladium for her, with her need for recognition etc. But I have found that she was too hard for Palladium. Palladium has something touching, he suffers. The problem of my last Palladium patient touched me. I am telling you that if this one had told me that she had lost an arm, it would have left me stone cold. I had no feelings for her whatsoever and I prescribed my medicine based on this lack of compassion I felt. I had to find a remedy taking into account the problem at hand and the same time taking into account my personal feelings. I felt I couldn’t give Platina either which could have been the right one. With a Platina patient one feels challenged, involved, judged and forced into a power game.

A speaker: Adamas ?

Philippe Servais: Yes that’s it.

I often give from my own stock of medicines, but I didn’t have ADAMAS. It is not listed under this name in the French nomenclature, thus I put something else on the prescription and she liked it very much.

As regards her cough, she made a remarkable recovery.

Do you know what it is called in the French nomenclature? Diamant Blanc (White diamond). Diamant Blanc 30ch ! However, I was a bit worried: was it really Adamas ? In any case, she found it was fantastic, she went to the pharmacy next door, ordered it and fetched her white diamond the same afternoon!

Her reaction to the remedy was that her cough got worse for one hour or two and then it disappeared progressively within twenty-four hours. Shortly after that she came to see me and said : “ You know, you are the first person, the first therapist, whoever helped me, even the psychoanalyst couldn’t help me”. After the dose of 3O CH, she reduced the several other medicines she had been taking by half. Another dose of 15 CH two and a half months later and she stopped the allopathic medicines completely. I ordered one dose of Adamas 1 000k but for the moment she doesn’t need it : her depression has gone.

What can we say about the diamond? Like the gold, it is precious, but more than that, it’s value lies in the sparkle, it has a thousand fires. If you put a diamond in its box or in the dark, it does not shine, it suddenly loses its value. It only sparkles in the light. In fact, it renders the person who wears it more valuable. Women who wear diamonds do it to give themselves more value. How does one give oneself value? By provoking a reaction from the others. This is the case of my patient: her second husband puts her in the limelight. He is like the diamond one wears: he is so well known and influential (even if they are not really suited, she was much more compatible with the first husband!). She “wears” this man like a pendant to show off. In an egotrophic sense, thanks to him, she outshines the others like a beautiful diamond does.

Adamas and Palladium have this feeling of not being worth anything, but given affection, Palladium feels worth something. In her case it is purely a matter of appearance. “I have to shine. Anything to make me shine”. That is why I think that she could have carried on with her psychoanalysis for the next twenty-five years without any result. She has no desire to get to know herself and doesn’t make the slightest effort to improve. The only thing she wants from the therapists is to stop her depression, without wanting to do anything for her own evolution.

Thinking about it, we come to the conclusion that it could only be Adamas. It is true that a diamond is cold. In its rough state, it has little value. The value comes with the work that is performed on it by an outside person.

I found it interesting to analyse these two personalities Palladium and Adamas who seem to have a similar problem, but are in fact very different.

A speaker: And the need for protection?

Philippe Servais: The need to be valuable is hidden behind an obvious need for protection.

A speaker: And the nostalgia of the protection by the first husband?

Philippe Servais: The first husband gave her his undivided attention, she was his goddess and he was the attentive slave.