tions with the mother image, presented as castrating and overwhelming. Aggressivity directed towards her is more easily verbalized or expressed in an infantile manner, but the feeling of guilt remains very strong. As in the Rorschach, identifications are ambiguous: Alain readily identifies himself with a woman, but his desire for virile identification is strong. On the whole, all the themes are dramatized. The very acute conflicts with parental images entirely block his future prospects. At present, the only possible conclusions are failure, death or compensation is precarious: it leads him to endless and purposeless themes of war and air battles that are concerned with objects only, for Alain was unable to introduce any hero character. Summary. The variety of symptoms, the family data, and the very particular personality of the mother lead one to think of reactions of opposition. Beside these symptoms, Alain's ego resorts to an obsessional type of organization, the defenses having a positive and strengthening value for the personality. This case is particularly interesting insofar as it shows the interaction of an uncommon family history and the need to resolve the conflicts of adolescence at the level of identifications and the choice of an ego ideal. Torn between the mother's desires that he make his career in either music or sports, Alain searched in the imaginary world (overemphasizing war and aviation) for an ideal father image that would enable him to sublimate his forbidden agressive drives. His final choice of sports represented a satisfactory compromise which integrated his mother's wishes for him and his own acknowledgement of the body in reference to the father's work.