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The treatment is described of a boy of four years suffering from social isolation and incomplete ego differentiation. The history showed repeated separations from the mother, beginning at three months and extending up to the time of treatment. A total change of surroundings was repeatedly involved.
A central symptom which was repeated in the treatment was the child's need to retreat into a cupboard, under stress, and rub his face on his mother's fur coat. The treatment revealed a generalized tendency of the infantile ego to avoid loss by fixing upon a part of the object which it could retain and control. The child's primitive stereotyped patterns of behaviour disclosed a parallel effort to immobilize his own involuntary functions whose autonomous activity threatened him by stimulating phantasies of loss. The child's efforts to keep his objects by incorporation, control, and immobilization involved an almost complete sacrifice of essential reality.
The case is cited as representative of an important group of children who suffer severe object loss at a predominantly narcissistic stage of libido development, prior to the development of object constancy. The ego's need for an object cannot be met by a mere increase in narcissism, and the object is restored in inanimate form at some cost to the reality sense. The disorder described differs in degree and pervasiveness from the normal phenomenon of children solacing themselves with a doll or a piece of fur, which does not result in arrested development.