ABSTRACT
Traumatic early impingement is a prominent feature. The flooding of an immature mental apparatus by unmanageable stimuli appears repeatedly in the children’s early history. The child’s immaturity is sometimes combined with possible brain damage (Samuel), sometimes with severely disturbed states of mind in the mother, ranging from anxiety and fragility (Holly) to delusional attacks on the baby (Jonathan). There is some evidence of inter-generational transmission of unmoumed and unmetabolised earlier catastrophes in the family histories. Mary, a young child similar to Holly, provided a graphic example of this when she drew a wild picture with a red pen, spoke of the babies burning in the furnace, and muttered ‘Auschwitz’ under her breath. She was the daughter of a man who had in his adolescence lost all his family in the Holocaust and escaped through a degree of collaboration of which he was deeply ashamed. This child perpetually assaulted herself, in a
desperate effort to punish the bad internal objects by whom she felt dominated. The relationship between Samuel’s ghost and the ghost haunting his mother is another instance of this link (Sherwin-White).
