ABSTRACT
At present this boy is 15 years old; he began having treatment when he was 11, at a frequency of two sessions a week. He lives in an industrial town near Barcelona, where the medical centre in which he is being attended to is also situated. His father is 46 and his mother is 43. He has a brother, who is 13 years old, and a baby sister aged 6 months. His mother has had two miscarriages, the first before Jordi was bora and the second just before she got pregnant with the baby girl. The parents' main worry revolves around Jordi's exaggerated shyness, inhibition, and fears, while they consider his limited learning capacity to be a secondary problem. It appears that one of the main reasons for which they sought treatment was that they felt ashamed at the thought that other people should think he was not normal. The family in question belong to the middle class and are well known in the town as they run a rather prestigious business there, in which both parents as well as the maternal grandparents work. According to them, their lives are very much conditioned by this business, since they are always surrounded by people; this set of circumstances is what they put forth as the explanation for having difficulty in controlling the child, above all as regards his eating habits. "He eats what he likes—which is nearly always the same thing—and won't accept any changes." Whenever they try giving him something different, he kicks up a row, and, so as not to make a scene, they end up giving in to him. 46Jordi was born after eight years of marriage, shortly after the first of the previously mentioned miscarriages. He was a restless baby, prone to vomiting; he couldn't be left alone, he would always wake with a fright, and slept little. He was breast-fed until he was 6 months old, although they started feeding him cereals when he was 3 months. He was very greedy, and since he couldn't stand the pause between spoonfuls, they had to feed him with two spoons.
