ABSTRACT
Alfred Adler expresses a sense of dread about the odd and tragic course of development of the "difficult child". Children called "at risk" come for the most part from marginal and sometimes abusive families who suffer from a pseudo-hereditary illness that is transmitted from generation to generation. Bruno is silent and withdrawn into himself, but the children accept him from the start, because he is nice and evokes compassion. His mother is a woman with protruding teeth, a desultory way of speaking, who smiles continually in a benevolent sort of way. Some children are still at home, an adolescent girl of fifteen, Bruno, and little David each with a different father. Bruno smears the wall with his excrement and cuts his mother's dresses to shreds. When the parents return, the children resume their baby positions. They sleep rolled up in a ball while sucking their thumbs.
