Masked Maternal Deprivationによると考えられた言語発達遅滞児の1症例

抄録

It is well known that the maternal deprivation exerts a serious influence upon speech and language development, but little is known about these process of improvement.
The purpose of this paper is to report the process of improvement of a speechless girl who was deprived of her sufficient mothering in early childhood. In order to improve her delayed speech and language, reupbringing psychotherapy was applied, and she acquired first words after 8 months.
The major findings can be summarized as follows:
1) She showed marked retardation in social and verbal behavior comparison with moter development.
2) She made rapid progress in acquiring speech since she was 3 years old.
3) In the process of improvement, she showed remedial regression, such as aggressive behavior, test rejection, dependency, and school refusal.
4) It was considered that these remedial regression activated her attachment behavior which has been lacked by deprivation.
5) Improvement of verbal communication may precede that of non-verbal communication.
6) It may be conceivable that main factor of her speech and language delay was mainly due to masked maternal deprivation.