ABSTRACT
This paper is based on the psychotherapy of an adolescent boy whom I shall call Alexis, which began once a week when he was thirteen, was intensive for three years in his middle teens, and continued thereafter on a reduced basis into his early twenties. In it I want to explore the part that his use of symbols has played both in his psychotic functioning and in his recovery. By symbols I mean something - whether a pattern, a thing, or a concept - which is employed to hold emotionally charged meaning that does not intrinsically belong to it. At the simplest level in this sense a symbol simply stands for something else, as Klein typically used it in talking to children (e.g. Klein 1961, p. 24).
