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It is well known that inconsistency in the parents' educational behavior may result in a characteristic pathological development of a child's superego and ego formation.1 When children are in no position to anticipate the probable reaction of their environment to their actions and when they do not find any opportunity to develop lasting and consistent identifications, the development of both ego and superego is necessarily disturbed since the ego is based on the capacity for anticipating judgment and on oral identification, and the superego is nothing but a result of specifically constructed identifications.
Minna Emch discusses these problems from the viewpoint that 'knowing one's parents' forms the basis for the development of the sense of reality. Where the parents are unknown or unknowable (because of unpredicatable inconsistencies) the sense of reality is accordingly impaired. Emch distinguishes two subtypes of such impairment, characterized by the formulas: 'I must know everything', or, 'I don't know anything'. She reports one case history for each of the two categories. The first patient was characterized by a tendency towards acting out and a corresponding intolerance towards tensions; he was always ready to identify himself fleetingly with whoever happened to be present (for instance, with the woman in sexual situations), the identification having the significance of a caricature and of a 'magical gesture'. The second patient was filled with a spiteful denial of curiosity and scopophilic interests, and showed a kind of aggressive pseudo imbecility, interspersed with a compensating narcissism. Her identification with her mother, who was herself a very neurotic, inconsistent, successively exciting and frustrating person, had a pronounced aggressive note, again turning the patient into a caricature of her mother.
The intolerance and tendency towards fleeting and aggressive identifications makes the analysis of patients of this type very difficult. Certa