DISCUSSION: Dr. Eugene H. Kaplan questioned the reliability of the accounts on which many of the author's observations are based and suggested that other studies of different types of child abuse, including well-intended deprivational treatments, would be more instructive to study. Dr. Melvin Stanger offered some clinical material which he felt supported the author's findings concerning the development of defensive splitting and the reliance on a good object to help cope with murderous rage against parents guilty of overstimulation. Dr. Austin Silber emphasized the significance of Hauser's ego development being dissociated from the instinctual arrest, which he felt demonstrated the expansibility of the ego as compared to the drives. In response, Dr. Shengold defended the value of applied psychoanalytic studies and pointed out that the concept of soul murder was a dramatic concept rather than a clinical one, highlighting the impact of parental traumatization.