This is the story of a girl whom I shall call Farida, who said she was sexually abused. The aim of this paper is to explore, on the basis of three times weekly psychotherapy, her ways of thinking, using Bion's theory of thinking to assess whether this allegation is likely to be true or false. Or, whether true or false, if the disclosure so blinded the carers that further mistreatment took place because of failure to understand the real communication underneath.

Farida, an Asian girl, was originally referred when she was 12 years old, by her present foster-parents, because she appeared depressed and inconsolably unhappy. A brief outline of her previous history is that Farida's mother died when she was 3 years old and her brother, whom I shall call Imran, was 1 year old. She and her brother were then placed in a residential nursery for several months until they went to live with relatives