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In this article, the author offers a detailed description of the psychotherapy of a child from the ages of five to nine years old, reflecting on psychosomatic symptomatology, in this case mouth ulcers. Psychosomatic expression is here considered through the work of Joyce McDougall, on the incapacity to face feelings in relation with the experience of annihilation, as well as the work of Frances Tustin and Sydney Klein, on the somatization of enclosed autistic and existential anxieties, in relation to bodily separation from the maternal figure. The author reflects upon the significance of particular bodily aspects of counter-transference and the way that its interpretation allows the patient to come out of his deep retreat, making way for psychosomatic symptoms.