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This patient with migraine transformed into somatic form his emotional conflicts. The nucleus of these conflicts seemed to be the fantasy that the patient had destroyed the object world and was unable to restore it. These objects were internalized in an attempt to recapture them and to protect the patient against his own destructiveness; he also thus placated the objects by castrating himself. He could control the objects by putting them inside his head in an animistic, magical way, and then expelling them again (projection) when the attempted control was ineffective. Use of the head for this introjection is explained by the general characteristics of the head 'which makes it apt for representation of a cavity, the abdomen, and of the penis'. Other determinants were 1, a tonsillectomy, in which he was really 'attacked in the head'; 2, intense intellectual rivalry with a younger brother; 3, verbal fights with his father, the ear thus being the most used organ for his punishment; 4, his mother's remark to the patient that he must never touch the fontanel of the baby; and 5, the obligatory role of the head at birth.