As the author states, this communication is an exercise into the realms of the unknowable, that is, an attempt to understand the function of the infantile mind in the very earliest weeks of life. It is an excellent presentation of very complicated prebody ego mental mechanisms and thus needs to be read in its entirety to be fully understood. In essence the author discusses the perceptual affective beginnings of the first weeks of life and shows how the mental mechanisms which exist then are different from such basic mechanisms as introjection, projection, and identification, although probably antecedents of these. Bonnard demonstrates how the continuance of these very early mechanisms into adult life is manifested, especially in severely disturbed people. She presents three cases, one adult and two children, and describes in considerable detail how she recognized and coped with the symptoms that resulted from these disturbed perceptual affective states of infancy.