ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that some degree of psychosis in childhood is common, but it is not noticed because of the way in which the symptoms are hidden in the ordinary difficulties inherent in child care. Where there is restricted intellectual capacity the infant’s capacity to convert not-quite-good-enough environmental adaptation into good-enough environmental adaptation is lowered, with the result that certain psychoses are more common in defectives than in the normal population. The false self, developed on a compliance basis, cannot attain to the independence of maturity, except perhaps a pseudo-maturity in a psychotic environment. Mental ill-health of psychotic quality arises out of delays and distortions, regressions and muddles, in the early stages of growth of the environment-individual set-up. The persecutors in the new phenomenon, the outside, become neutralized in ordinary healthy development by the fact of the mother’s loving care, which physically and psychologically, makes the individual’s primary isolation a fact.
