ABSTRACT
Kane increasingly wished to join the world of shared human experience, and more and more often felt safe enough to do so for a time. He made efforts to adapt at school, which paid off in terms of his peer relationships and his academic performance. Kane was scornful of his parents, which left him in the position of having no adult internal presences to support him. He often dwelt repetitively on these obsessions in the early months of treatment. It was not until much later that he felt safe enough to make plain the fairly ordinary, though intensely painful, human anxieties that underlay them. Kane's choice of gorillas in the session is a measure of how far he had moved towards joining the shared human world: he no longer needed to dress up his extreme vulnerability in a disguise of "madness".
