ABSTRACT
A totally innocent person is physically attacked, usually in a public place—and not infrequently a very crowded place. Yet hitherto the assaulter and the victim have neither met nor known anything about each other. This chapter presents the ideas that are based on a series of meetings, in a medium secure hospital, with ten patients. The first two, PH and ME, could not be said by any means to have been psychoanalysed in a meetings with them. The setting for the third patient, JP, was quite different. JP was also interested in and able to maintain the capacity to be a psychoanalytic patient. JP assaulted a perfect stranger on the London Underground, attempting to push him off the platform. In these patients, any mood changes, irritability and a sense of total dissatisfaction with self, and its converse manic happiness or dramatic story-telling, have to be noted as dangerous prognostic signs.
