This is an extremely interesting report on an analysis of an adolescent girl with a 'borderline' illness. Born with a congenital dislocation of both hips, she underwent in addition almost every possible emotional trauma of childhood from constant cruel treatment at the hands of a jealous, rejecting, psychotic mother, through repeated open observation of her parents' coitus embellished with many variations such as fallatio and cunnilingus, to an operation on her hip in the middle of which she came out of the anæsthetic (or fantasied that she did so) and was terrified by the instruments and blood. When she came for treatment her desire for a sexual relation with her father, a baby from him, his penis, the death of her mother and her younger sister were all vividly conscious. Ries's account of the ensuing analysis with its tortuous and sometimes psychotic, transference phenomena is well worth reading.