Psychosomatic Medicine 10:275-278 (1948)
© 1948 American Psychosomatic Society

Psychosomatic Studies of Children With Allergic Manifestations

I. Maternal Rejection: A Study of Sixty-Three Cases

¹ Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of Southern California Medical School

The present paper is the first in a series on a psychosomatic study of clinical allergy. A group of 63 clinically allergic children was compared for certain items with a control group of 37 without symptoms of allergy.

Somatic data were obtained from medical examinations and skin tests; psychologic data from interviews with the parents and play or interview sessions with the children, supplemented by observations by the physician during examination and treatment.

In this paper the problem of maternal rejection is defined and described qualitatively and the evidence of rejection is compared statistically in the two groups.

In the allergy group, 62 of the 63, or 98.4 per cent, of the children suffered from maternal rejection; in the nonallergy group, 9 of the 37 children, or 24.3 per cent. The critical ratio of the difference in proportions was seen to be highly significant.

Thus it can be said that maternal rejection appears to be an important factor in the personality and somatic symptom-patterns of the clinically allergic child.