The author considers the shock to their own infantile omnipotence that parents of a seriously ill or deformed child must undergo. The mourning for the real child offers itself to the parents as a means of avoiding another task of mourning (for the infantile part of themselves) or of masking the identification of the parent with the sick child. A child is the agent that links us with our own infancy, and the alliance established with the physician about the ailing child is not merely an affair of adults, since it also involves the infantile aspects of the parents. In treatment these parents sometimes seem especially gifted for the analytic process, but in reality they have too quickly reached the stages in analysis that ordinarily take several years. And much of the psychic work that is encountered in analysis has to do with the attempt to kill the child within them, as a result of the tragic confusion between the child they have and the child they were, as if the coexistence of the two children were