This is the first publication of a case presentation which Helene Deutsch made to the Boston Psychoanalytic Society in the early 1940's. In his introduction, Paul Roazen sets the paper in its historical perspective, nothing especially its emphasis on an empirical approach which cut across the then existing boundaries between psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This was one of the very earliest reported cases of anorexia nervosa to have been treated psychoanalytically. The therapeutic contract included a promise on the part of the analyst that the patient would not have to discuss her eating habits so long as she maintained a predetermined minimum weight, but that treatment would be suspended if the patient fell below this standard. In this context, it became possible to treat the patient's very serious character pathology psychodynamically, to a good outcome. This may be the origin of the contemporary technique of establishing an "anorexia number" in the dynamic psychotherapy of patients who present with significant undereating.