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It is well known that for stutterers words may have the significance of fæces. Beyond this, words may also represent introjected objects which have been identified with fæces. The reviewer summarized this once in the following way: 'A conflict which originally took place between the individual and an object is now expressed … by means of a conflict between the ego and its speech apparatus or its speech products.'1 This was also the case in Mrs. Usher's seven-year-old patient. In the terminology of Mrs. Klein, however, this looks as follows:
'Since first interviews have a peculiar interest all their own, I should like to describe his opening gambit. He started examining the two toy trucks, one of which he mistakenly decided was broken. "One of them must have bumped into the other", he said. He then picked up a brick which had a hole in the middle of it, remarking "something's missing". I interpreted the two trucks as representing his parents in sexual intercourse, and the brick as his sister.
'He next turned to the little train which he made run about very fast. He agreed it contained his parents, and he volunteered: "Mummy and Daddy are strapped in so that the wind won't blow them away." And so he staged for me the mise-en-scene of his personal conflicts. I mentally concluded that I was going to witness a drama where the severest struggle would be played out internally. He seemed to be showing me symbolically that the parents were internalized and strapped down, not only to prevent them from copulation but also to protect them from his own aggressive attacks by flatus. And as his remarks were accompanied by an access of stammering, one determinant at least of this symptom had been revealed.
'… One day he got out his box of chalks. It fell on the ground and his pencils rolled out: "I've eaten too much and my tummy's bursted", was his comment. It was clear from his preceding play that these represented the penises inside me which he thought he had eate