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In this work, I explore psychosis as an intersubjective state. Positing the importance of an early traumatic loss of a significant figure, I describe a situation in which a caregiver is not able to achieve separateness and unconsciously relates to their child as a replacement for the beloved lost object. The child unconsciously interprets this complicated state as a plea to abandon separateness and exist as a part of the caregiver’s inner world. This act of surrender is unconsciously phantasised by the child as a means of preserving the aliveness of the caregiver’s central internal object, which holds the caregiver’s subjectivity together. In unconsciously fulfilling the role of protector of his caregiver’s sanity, the child becomes bound by the psychotic anxiety that demonstrating autonomy will destroy this state of merger causing the caregiver’s mind to disintegrate. The child thus feels that he cannot develop himself without risking the caregiver’s collapse and must therefore become ‘nobody’ or ‘no-thing’, often psychotic and sometimes suicidal. I describe a continuum of pathology dependent on the caregiver’s ability to differentiate their child from their forsaken object. I present a clinical example of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a five-year-old boy who suffered from psychotic anxiety about bodily fragmentation, and the accompanying work with his mother, who was neglected in her childhood. I discuss the essential elements of playing, which were crucial in reaching this boy in his psychotic, near-death state. The implications of this theoretical view illustrate the repercussions of self-sacrifice on a child’s ability to accept help.