Helene's brother Emil, however, offered abuse rather than affection. Emil sexually abused Helene when she was around four years old, and continued to torment her throughout her childhood. In her later life, Helene saw this affair as the 'root cause of her tendency not only secretly to fantasize, but to relay these fantasies as truth.' Deutsch singled out schizoid personalities who 'seem normal enough because they have succeeded in substituting "pseudo contacts" of manifold kinds for a real feeling contact with other people; they behave "as if" they had feeling relations with other people ... their ungenuine pseudo emotions'. More broadly, she considered that 'the "generally frigid" person who more or less avoids emotions altogether ... may learn to hide their insufficiencies and to behave "as if" they had real feelings and contact with people'.