ABSTRACT
The patient’s mother had died when the patient was just over a year old, at which time he was moved to his paternal grandparents. There he was brought up by his grandmother who treated him as if she were his mother, and no mention was made of his actual mother. After re-joining his father, and the new wife, the patient was treated very coldly by this pretend mother, and her coldness to him increased noticeably after she gave birth to her own children. He could not fail to see that he was being treated very differently from the way this mother was treating those other children. He just knew he had never had the same warmth or closeness with her that they were having. He felt a misfit in the family. One day the patient came to a session in extreme distress. He had just been to a family funeral and had only just made it to his session.
