Facial image and object constancy: a clinical experience and a developmental inference.

This report is derived from analytic data in the case of a young woman with a concurrent neurologic deficit, prosopagnosia. The condition consists of an inability to recognize or evoke the facial images of the most familiar persons in one's life. With this disability, will there be a corresponding dysfunction in the psychologic structuralization comprising object constancy? The clinical material presented indicates a lack of object constancy in this patient, as well as a corresponding developmental fixation at the rapprochement level of separation-individuation. Reconstruction of the patient's childhood appears to corroborate these findings.