ABSTRACT
Early in my training in psychiatry I developed a habit of keeping notes on my work with patients whose cases, I thought, would give me illustrations of psychodynamic concepts and whom I considered as “special”. Attis was certainly a special patient for me. While writing this book, decades after my first meeting with him, I primarily depended on my notes and what I had written about him in my two previous books, Primitive Internalized Object Relations (Volkan, 1976) and The Infantile Psychotic Self and its Fates (1995). I do not have extensive notes on my work with him during his first hospitalisation at the North Carolina Memorial Hospital, which lasted three months, but I do have some vivid memories.
