The Münchhausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP), included in the DSM-III since 1980, consists of behaviors whereby a person who is close to a child (almost always the mother) suggests or feigns false signs in order to have the child submitted to medical examination. The present article proposes a reading of this configuration from a psychoanalytic perspective. The basic hypothesis is that this disorder is produced by failings in the mother's operation of transitivism.
Münchhausen syndrome by proxy; transitivism; mother-child relation; psychoanalysis