IN THIS PAPER WE SHALL DESCRIBE A critical period in the therapy of a psychotic child. The treatment was psychoanalytically informed. Psychoanalysis would not have been appropriate as a treatment technique in a child as seriously disturbed as the one we are about to describe. We feel, however, that valuable psychoanalytic insights could be gained by studying the interaction of a psychotic mother-child pair and by describing how treatment helped the child to free himself from a pathological symbiotic relationship with his mother.

This child was being seen in a university-based treatment center for emotionally disturbed children.1 The treatment design employs three modalities: (1) psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy which uses a tripartite2 approach, i.e., mother