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This is a richly rewarding case history told, as always by Fraiberg and her group, with a refreshing warmth and naturalness rare for professional journals. It demonstrates in concrete clinical detail the application of dynamic understanding in formulating a lifesaving intervention with the family of a critically malnourished infant, with the "failure to thrive" syndrome (growth indicia below the third percentile, without organic cause). Families with such infants are notoriously difficult to engage in treatment; the mothers are impaired in their capacity to nourish, literally and emotionally. A program based on early case finding and home-based therapy sessions by a primary therapist backed by a clinical support team, with meticulous attention to parental needs as well as to those of the infant patient, proved highly successful. This account is particularly valuable in its beautiful descriptions of the observed interactions of mother and infant. As a lesson in how to watch, and what to watch, this paper is worth a full semester's course in infant observation. It also points up again this group's reminder of the value of parent-infant games as a source of rich dynamic information. Fraiberg's "ghosts in the nursery" metaphor (the repetition of childhood conflicts and defenses in the adult's parenting) is sensitively and dramatically delineated.