In this examination of the impact of divorce on child development, the parents’ marriage as a container of the child's emerging affects and drive expressions is identified as crucial to healthy psychological growth of the child. Parental separation and divorce threaten to destabilize child development by removing the needed container and thereby overwhelming the child's immature ego structures with excessive drive energies from within and without. The four cases that are presented examine the psychopathology that may emerge in response to marital dissolution and the interventions that help restore psychic structure. Prevention, the author maintains, requires treatment of the marriage and the child at the earliest sign of marital difficulty.