I have presented material pertaining to precocious intellectuality on a four-and-a-half-year-old boy as reconstructed from his analysis. The child, highly endowed intellectually, was exposed to prolonged states of tension by inept mothering and fathering. Conscious and unconscious parental attitudes favored the channeling of drive expression toward certain modalities, and away from others, thereby reinforcing and encouraging a preferred mode of intellectual functioning. Thus equipment and environment interacted to give intellectuality a heightened cathexis. A "need to learn" was gradually organized into a learning pattern that served tension reduction, the achievement of physical and emotional closeness, the mastery of drives and external reality. The babbling period is emphasized as representing an important phase in the development of intellectuality. Intellectuality is viewed as a mode of functioning adaptively or defensively, depending on the changing level of drive tension.