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How children internalize emotional neglect has been largely understood from reconstructions during psychoanalytic treatment. This paper describes the psychic internalization of maltreatment on the basis of data from a prospective study of emotional development begun in 1964 with 125 infants and followed to age 30. In 2023, two subjects at age 58 – who came from two of the most dysfunctional families – contacted the project asking for copies of their mother-child films in order to understand themselves better. We sent them film clips, which showed extremely troubled mother-infant interaction, as well as the 30-year report summarizing their parents’ as well as their own interviews, school observations, psychodiagnostic testing, and the Adult Attachment Interview. In contemporary follow-up interviews they brought their lives up to date and described how the movies comfortingly validated their memories. For comparison, the project enlisted two subjects whose mother-infant interactions rated amongst the highest in mutual responsiveness and pleasure. The stories of the two from troubled families show their process of adapting internally and in life to their early trauma and psychically transforming it over decades. Nonetheless their deprivation persisted unconsciously and consciously as dysphoria and affect hunger. This report includes the subjects’ experience with personal psychotherapy and its implications for treatment of patients with similar histories.