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20th May 1954.
Dear Dr. Frank:
The meeting was so late last night that I was not able to go to Dr. Lantos' afterwards; I find that very late nights make the next day's work impossible. I am therefore writing to say that I enjoyed your paper and I thought that it was a very useful and honest case description.
You added a very great deal to your case by letting us know that the patient does not acknowledge feeling happy. In my opinion this made sense of the case and certainly it in no way spoiled the feeling that we got about the work done in the three years of the treatment.
I think you will understand that your title “A Case of Over Indulgence” was responsible for drawing us towards the interplay of the mother and child factors in the early stages of this patient's development. I feel that there is a great deal here that you could tell us if we could have drawn you out. By a certain date I suppose in the childhood of this patient it could be said that the mother was over indulging because of the special needs of her child.
Before that date one would have to say that the mother was in some way prevented from enjoying a simple straightforward love-hate relationship with her child, and through the difficult times that she was in and through the fact of its being her last child she was compelled to exaggerate the giving aspect of the relationship, and leaving out some of the other tremendously important things about mothering. For instance, the patient's symptom of not knowing what to do with her hands seems to me to be likely to be associated with the mother's inability to wait for the infant to create out of need by hand exploration. Satisfaction came too early, too quickly, and too well, and in this respect one can say that the infant's hands were cut off in respect of their creativity.
I was longing for you to tell us more about this child's use of dolls and teddies and objects and the whole matter of what (as you know) I have termed the transitional phenomena of her earl