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Mother-child interaction has always been an area of particular interest in psycho-analysis. With the growth of interest and knowledge in ego psychology, more subtle and discrete issues of the mother-child transaction have been investigated and described. One such area of study has been that devoted to intrusive maternal overstimulation and its effect on the budding ego of the child. Schur (1962) has underlined the vulnerability of the young organism to intrusive stimulations as opposed to its relatively valid equipment for seeking and approaching need-gratifying sources. Spitz (1950) illustrates how inappropriate maternal stimulation disturbs the satisfactory completion of action cycles and leads to chronic, disruptive tension states. Boyer (1956) and Giovacchini (1964) have described ego defects directly traceable to massive maternal stimulation in childhood. This paper is an attempt to describe a specific symptom which originally appeared as cultural deprivation, and to evaluate its significance from the point of view of ego-development, and trace its genesis to a particular kind of maternal intrusiveness.
The material has been gathered from the analysis of a young man. Large quantities of analytic data have had to be omitted for the sake of brevity and manageability. I hope, however, that there is enough here for the reader to experience with the author some of the impact of the pathology.
Mr T O, a 26-year-old single male referred himself to Dr Z for a diagnostic evaluation after participating in a homosexual episode. After determining that the patient could probably benefit from an analysis, Dr Z referred the patient to me. T called me immediately after his diagnostic interview, stating that he had called me to tell me when I could see him. He urgently demanded that he be given an early appointment. It was possible to see him soon after he called and he appeared considerably earlier than the scheduled time.
T was urbanely charming and pleasant as he pr