ABSTRACT
In considering what it means to speak of a child having to ‘come to terms’ with loss of this order the notion of a capacity to process external events into internal experience becomes central. Thus the legacy of the abandoned child is usually not only the burden of being abandoned but of being left with extremely inadequate mental resources to cope with a degree of pain which would overwhelm the most favourably brought up child. The indirect evidence about Ian’s state of mind which touched author most was the quality of his destructiveness in his sessions. It brought home to author the distinction between a child who at a particular moment is driven by the wish to destroy and a child who, as well as trying to discharge his feelings, is also trying to communicate his sense of his world having been destroyed.
