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In 1934 (1) and again in 1942 (2) Helene Deutsch described her psycho-analytic observations on several patients 'whose whole relationship to life had something about it which was lacking in genuineness and yet outwardly ran along as if it were complete'. She found that 'the apparently normal relationship of these patients to the world corresponded to a child's imitativeness and was the expression of identification with the environment, a mimicry which resulted in an ostensibly good adaptation to the world of reality despite the absence of object cathexis. The same emptiness and the same lack of individuality which was so evident in the emotional life of the "as if" personality appeared also in the moral structure. They were completely without character and wholly unprincipled in the literal meaning of the term.' One of Dr. Deutsch's patients 'behaved like a child in that stage of development in which its instinctual drives are curbed only by immediate external authority. In "as if" patients the objects are kept external and all conflicts are acted out in relation to them. Conflict with the super-ego is thus avoided because in every gesture and in every act the "as if" ego subordinates itself through identification to the wishes and commands of an authority which has never been introjected.' Dr. Deutsch stated that these patients were 'suggestible and their aggressive tendencies were almost completely masked by passivity. The narcissism and the poverty of object relationships so characteristic for an "as if" personality' led her to consider the relationship of this defect to psychosis. 'The fact that reality testing is fully maintained removes this condition from our conception of psychosis.' Her first two analytically observed cases led her to suspect a schizophrenic process. Dr. Deutsch expressed the opinion that one of the basic factors in the etiology of the 'as if' personality 'was related to a devaluation of the object serving as a model for the deve