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I wanted to add a couple of thoughts from our discussion.  One of the things that we recognized was that the mother was indeed doing active work to process the story of seeing her son's name on the bathroom wall and the intense reaction it had evoked in her. 

It was clear that on some level, her intense reaction made her uncomfortable. I am guessing the writing that she did was a way to deal with the conflict between her unconscious self (which was extemely uncomfortable) and social norms which dictated that she should probably let it go.

Ultimately she did no let it go, she wrote an article in the New York times.  That article happened to make all three of us uncomfortable.  We all read saw this woman as over-reacting.   

Of curse I am guessing many other people resonated deeply with the story that she told (as evidenced by somebody's decision to publish it in the times). 

We raised a couple questions in dealing with this "case"

1. Did the woman actually come to us for treatment? If not than we should recongize that she has probably used the writing as a way of dealing with a difficult story and probably does not need any further help reconciling her story. 

2. If she did come for treatment - than we would do well to reconize the value of the piece she had written in laying out some of her own conflicting stories.  We might be able to help her (maybe through the further writing/journaling) to dig deeper into her stories in such a way that makes sense to her. Having said that again, we should recognize that story that she tells can be very valuable to her and to others.

3.  The only qualm that we all had was how her story might or might not be affecting her child. We thought that might be a valuable thing to explore with her - especially in the light of the fierce love that she has for him.