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It is not necessary for me here to do more than mention the fact that, in making the discoveries and enunciating the principles of psycho-analysis, it has for the most part been found absolutely essential to submit the largest possible body of material to laborious and detailed examination. Occasionally, however, a particular observation reveals so vividly certain points of fundamental theoretical importance that we feel justified in publishing it and not confining ourselves to the study of wider relations.
It is an observation of this sort which will be communicated briefly here. The subject is a fourteen-year-old girl who suffers from a slight manifest neurosis, and whose mother has been having analytical treatment for the last year on account of depression. The child has two elder sisters, about whom there is nothing specially noteworthy. A brother, the eldest of the family, died some time ago. The mother's neurosis is based on the vicissitudes of her childhood, youth and married life, but we have evidence that these have had no direct influence on the daughter. With regard to the latter's bodily health she displayed a remarkable peculiarity at birth, for she came into the world with a complete congenital spasm of the pylorus, which made it impossible for her to take nourishment at all. When she was three and a half weeks old an operation was performed, and, at the age of four weeks, she could take food normally, was putting on weight satisfactorily and suffered no further disturbance in her bodily development. It was at no time necessary to restrict her food, and hence it struck the mother, with her long experience of caring for and observing the elder children, as all the more remarkable in this baby that, when she began to speak articulately at the very early age of eighteen or twenty months, she manifested quite plainly distress coloured by anxiety and spoke of 'hunger'. In her third year she suddenly developed an inexplicable ill-humour, and said: '