Certain impulse-ridden characters or hysterics who act out suffer from an insufficiently internalized, rigid superego. They lack real love objects and an integrated ego. The pathological superego usurps the place of all other psychic structures. The analysis of one such patient remained at an impasse until Reich 'analyzed the mother' for the patient, reconstructing the picture of the dead mother from the fragments of data emerging in the analysis. In active fashion, Reich devalued the mother, expressing various judgments which demonstrated the mother's severe neuroticisms and destructive influence on those around her. This 'demotion' of mother, combined with careful analysis, yielded a highly gratifying analytic result. Such a procedure normally has no place in analysis but it effected the disintegration of the pathological superego.