ABSTRACT
Basically the psychoanalytic approach with a toddler is the same kind as with infants. The mother had almost died when Hilda was born, and it took some weeks before she recovered. The mother early in the child's life helps the child to handle the impressions, fantasies and experiences by making them digestible and bringing order and meaning to them. Unthinkable anxiety and nameless fear can be described as an expression of a formless fear, a fear that has to do with the horror of being dissolved and lost in in an empty space. One session after some months of analysis Hilda all of a sudden became very afraid of a little bear, made of plastic. The treatment continued for another few more months together with her mother, altogether till Hilda was thirty-two months old. Fear had got a form, a shape, and had become reasonably bearable under her parents' protection.
