ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes work with the adolescent. Daniel was a patient who had remained extremely porous to parental projections and had not developed a protective 'no-entry system of defences'. It was necessary for a child so deprived, to establish some trust in the transference relationship, as a reliable container, before he could shift from controlling something inanimate, like food, or the books he 'devoured'. He begins to develop a relationship of dependency on, rather than addiction to, another person, one who was by no means as available to his control as things inanimate. In that he was born addicted to Valium, Daniel had had, from the very beginning, an experience of concrete foreign bodies seeping into his bloodstream. He was ten weeks premature and was born with a number of malformations, including an occlusion of his nasal tract. The people remember that his mother had become pregnant again when he was still in the incubator.
