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Over the past twenty months we have had the opportunity to observe two youngsters who were reared by their psychotic mother in virtually total isolation from one another as well as the rest of the world. The data appears both to supplement and complement that obtained from the study of infants reared in institutions (1), (2), (3), (5), (7), (8), (15), (21), (22), (27), (29) and observations made on congenitally blind youngsters (10), (14), (20). Similar cases in the literature tend to be considered together with another distinct, albeit related, set of problems—that of the so-called feral or wolf child. Common to both groups are experiences in the mother-infant dyad which, to say the least, are outside the range of the average and expectable. It seems to us that consideration of the striking qualitative differences in their respective experiences in conjunction with the subsequent life histories of the individuals is of theoretical interest.
Anne is the second child of parents of Eastern European stock who reside in a semirural community. There is no known history