ABSTRACT
This chapter presents in detail the case of Uri and his treatment to illustrate the practical as well as scientific need to integrate psychoanalytic and developmental approaches. Uri was referred for treatment because of enuresis at the age of nine. Uri began to talk at the age of two-and-a-half to three, and the parents could not recall any peculiarities in his speech. The constant struggle between Uri and his family finally brought him into therapy. It is quite plausible that the energetic behaviour of Uri’s mother, far from damaging the child, actually helped to pull Uri out of his autistic world, though at the price of building up a borderline personality whose functioning depended extensively on “primitive” defence mechanisms. Uri’s omnipotent, grandiose fantasies and wishes have to be understood as compensatory attempts to cope with severe narcissistic injuries incurred as a result of grossly deviant development. Psychotherapy was aimed at arresting the merry-go-round, thus letting off its participants.
