Psychosomatic Medicine 21:438-447 (1959)
© 1959 American Psychosomatic Society

Role of a Vicarious Object in the Adaptation to Object Loss

II. Vicissitudes in the Role of the Vicarious Object

¹ Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, N. Y.

This report has been a further consideration of the vicarious object mechanism of adjustment focusing on the person used as a vicarious object and his adaptations when a change in the relation ensues. Most of the children with leukemia had been vicarious objects for their mothers, largely because of emotional deprivations for the mother preceding and during the pregnancy with the child. During later circumstances involving personal losses and further disappointments, the mother gave up the child as a vicarious object and usually became psychologically depressed. In this combination of circumstances the child's manifest leukemia developed. From these findings in children, along with the findings in adult patients, I suggest that an involvement in a vicarious object relation is one common precursor in persons in the population who become ill with leukemia and other "psychosomatic" disease. Disruption of the vicarious object relation for such persons determines when the somatic manifestations will develop. The particular somatic manifestations are determined mainly by biological rather than psychological characteristics of the individual.