A severely ego-impaired three-and-a-half-year-old boy, with a constant, longstanding, divergent strabismus of widely variable angle, began psychotherapy. Within a few months the symptom lessened considerably and later vanished almost completely in the therapeutic environment. Careful documentation of when, where, and how the strabismus varied led to conviction about the influence of the therapeutic relationship on the symptom. From infancy the child had suffered beatings from both parents. The hypothesis is raised that the parents' aggression made it necessary for the child "to avoid seeing the threat, to avoid focusing on the threat." The author also proposes that strabismus is a derivative of the psychic fragmentation which follows the loss of or inability to construct an inner object. Other major strides in ego functioning are also shown to parallel the internalization of the therapist and the mastery of aggression. A link between the capacity for depth perception and intraspsychic separation is cautiously postulated.