A patient developed excessively sadistic impulses when her timid, gentle parents allowed her to tyrannize them. Another patient, blind from birth (reported by Omwake and Solnit, 1961), developed sadistic impulses in the face of withdrawal of the mother and the latter's failure to make up for visual deprivation through other sensory modalities. In both cases beating fantasies formed as a means of protecting their 'good' objects and selves. The fantasies also permitted a safe differentiation of the sexes in the first case and of the object from self in the second.