A thirty-five-year-old woman with a pathological use of word symbols, in the form of obsessive verbalizations, had been in analysis four months at the time of this report. The patient complained, "I don't live in the world, I live in words … only words are real." Through an intense transference, the patient recalled childhood memories of traumatic mothering, which resulted in a defective libidinous object relationship. This interfered with the development of symbols which should have served as functional integrators in "the preconscious storehouse of symbolic structures of imagery and language." As a child, the patient had used words as an emergency defense to protect her integrity. However, her whole personality structure became partly fixated and partly regressed at the anal level. She was left with defects in her synthetic and repressive ego functions. Aggressive energy was attached to word symbols which were magical and therefore dangerous.