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It is in the tradition of psychoanalytic methodology to draw conclusions about normal psychic development from manifestations of pathology. This has advantages and disadvantages, sometimes illuminating truth which can be arrived at in no other way, sometimes slanting it to fit certain theoretical preconceptions. Occasionally one is fortunate enough to encounter clinical material which is so dramatically illustrative that it leaves little doubt about the genesis and meaning of the individual's pathology, thereby making clear what the desirable and normal developmental outcome should have been. It is about such a case that I wish to report in broad outlines, because it conveys so powerfully a failure in the mother-child relationship with its ensuing malformations in psychic organization, thus making clearer what the optimal mother-child matrix should be.
A peculiar scientific merit of this case resides in the fact that I had the rare opportunity of analyzing the young woman in question as a girl of twenty-two and then again twenty-five years later as a person in her late forties. The perspective in time—time which for the patient covered the better part of her adult life—gave me an opportunity to understand the conflicts of the earlier period in a new light. The fact that in the later period the patient was a mature individual, in the sense that she had lived an adult life with marriage and motherhood, albeit somewhat unsuccessfully, motivated her to re-examine and re-evaluate her life, thus facilitating the therapeutic task and making it much more of a cooperative effort. I also had the opportunity of observing how the deficits in her own mothering influenced her capacity to be a mother.
Mary, as I shall call the patient, looked out at the world with