The Hollow-i Syndrome

The ring finger seen here is decidedly thinner than the middle and index fingers. See also the illustration on page 13.

The feature linked to the Hollow-i Syndrome is the marked thinness throughout the length of the ring finger relative to the other fingers. The thinner this digit when compared with the others on the same hand, the more heightened its level of severity as manifest in personality.  As a rule, a balanced digital formula will include an index and ring finger that are very similar in length and girth.

History:

The one year old infant may not yet have mastery of a language, and it is only about now that he finds his uncertain feet to support him. From this position he would survey his world and seek to access and experience as much of it as those around him would permit.

It will be some time before this child will have the benefit of rational or analytical thought with a capacity for reason. The ability to enlist judicial perspectives and considered evaluations is still many years away. But for now everything becomes invested with enormous emotional significance. Everything is felt intensely. Feeling is everything. His sensitivities and sensibilities are acutely attuned to absolutely everything that touches his life. It is also what fuels his endless curiosity and marvelous appetite for discovery.

This is how it must be. Thus the infant is organized to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time. At this time information is absorbed in packages, as it were, with minimum attention to detail. One need only consider the distance an infant covers in the first two years of its life – mastery of a language, motoric development,  identification with its immediate physical and social environment, and the capacity to be willful – to appreciate how intensely involved the infant is with its life.

Into the life of this child there always comes a moment when it is wholly overtaken with excitement. For the child it would have been a hugely meaningful and powerful experience, as it carries with it a singularly marvelous significance. The child grasps that it was his experience. Being his experience, and his experience alone, it delivers the momentous realization that he has an existence that is separate and apart from that of his mother or father. At this time, who he is becomes a perfect and total extension of everything that he feels and imagines. What we have here and what we are describing is, in fact, the germ of what eventually evolves in the adult as the sense of self.

Consider the response of the child in the wake of just such an experience, one replete with emotional significance and such as to completely consume his attentions. He rushes instantly to his mother to expose and have her share his excitement. But at that precise moment the mother has her attentions focused elsewhere. Perhaps she is in the midst of following a complicated recipe… or conversing intently with someone on her mobile… or at her dresser preparing herself for some occasion… the possibilities are many, but what invariably meets the child’s eyes is her back often accompanied by sharp words of impatience. 

When, as often happens, this experience is repeated with some regularity, the child soon understands that in his mother’s eyes all that fell so profoundly on his attentions and all that he had felt so intensely had neither validity nor legitimacy. But who he is is what he feels. If what he feels does not merit validity or legitimacy, the sense of who he is becomes bereft of   these very same values.

Seen above is a particularly extreme instance of the Hollow-i Syndrome.

The therapist should consider that this feature is a variable. Inasmuch as it may extend the entire life of the individual with unfortunate consequences for the quality of that life, the morphology of this digit lends itself to adjustment and should not be visualized as deterministic. Very often adjustments are recorded on one hand only. Nevertheless, this would be indicative of a positive development, or the potential for a positive development – a correction which should be pursued and enhanced.