The authors had an opportunity of observing most thoroughly a group of schizophrenic children in a therapeutic milieu. They describe two phenomena connected with the distorted self-perception characteristics of childhood schizophrenia: stereotyped muscular movements and the appearance of a face in scribbled drawings. The circular motions, scribbling and perversions are interpreted as desperate efforts to get hold of the unreachable maternal face. A buried memory becomes visible again in the emerging face, a memory related to the earliest experience of 'absolute goodness' prior to the frustration: the experience of the fusion of mother and self.