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Over the eight years in which he was observed, this child was subjected to influences from a highly dominating and punishing mother and a somewhat supine father. Traumas included severely restrictive bodily interference from birth onwards. During his childhood the mother repeatedly miscarried, and finally produced the more-desired girl child. Symptoms included sporadic identification with inanimate things, rotary movements, retarded speech and learning, and severe overt anxiety. Evidence suggests that hyperactivity and rebelliousness followed a normal start in life. The determining factor in his final reduction to passivity seems to have been a severe dysentery at 21 months when bodily interference and restriction was intensified for a period of six months. This episode seems to have been decisive for his final psychotic disorientation because its timing affected a highly erotized body zone, in a particularly stormy instinctual period; before the development of speech, when body integrity and body image are especially vulnerable; and when aware that he can assert himself, the child was not yet able to exercise self-control. His fear of drifting off into limitless space was the expression of his slender object relationships, threatened by primitive sadomasochistic fantasies; his fear of isolation drove him back into erotized subjugation to his mother. The picture was later complicated by a bisexual struggle in which he lacked adequate objects for identification.