ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of four-year-old Sophia. Her grandmother brings Sophia for treatment to a psychoanalyst suggesting a question in her mind as to the origin of these features of the females in the succeeding generations. As the treatment gets going Sophia re-presents with her analyst her silent early life. Her only existence is as an echo; devoid of a self and the spontaneity that would indicate its existence, she functions in an imitative way, mechanically repeating behaviours of 'care' with the doll figures. Throughout the clinical presentation the gradual emergence of Sophia's aggression reflects her growing vitality, and her propensity to collapse recedes as her ego coheres and integrates. Sophia's psychoanalytic treatment provides a setting in which her life-giving aggression could be harnessed and given meaning, thus bringing her out of the autistic bubble in which she was imprisoned.
