Two case reports are used to illustrate the point that psychotherapy with the mothers is apt to influence the situation of their 'symptom children'. The first-born child of a hysterical-neurotic mother seems especially predestined as the object of the mother's projection. The underlying conflicts are externalized and thus unconscious; very often they are incestuous fantasies and insufficiently developed (or pseudo-masculine) forms of sexual identity. The child is involved in the mother's neurosis and has to assume symptomatic functions.