ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the case of a young woman named Frances who did not possess an integrated and cohesive self representation. Frances, a woman in her midtwenties, was tall, slim, and flat-chested, with a clumsy carriage. At their first encounter, she greeted the analyst with a forced smile, and took her place in ghostly silence. The chapter focuses on a particular kind of object representation that can be deposited into a developing child's self representation. It reviews what has been said about "replacement children" in the literature dealing with children. Frances' favorite author was Edgar Allan Poe, that death-obsessed writer known to have faced early childhood loss with the death of his mother. Having the disfigurement in only one-half of her face once more was related to her inability to integrate her self-concept with the deposited representation: two different halves was another version of two layers of skin.
