ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case study of Damien: student drop-out and would-be professional psychiatric patient. Things had apparently started going wrong for Damien when he went to university in a different city to the one in which he had grown up. In the course of time, further major improvements occurred in Damien’s outside life. He not only managed to complete his degree course this time, but actually to get a quite respectable degree. This eventually led to his embarking on teacher training, and, although this inevitably involved a massive struggle for someone who still had such enormous difficulties with relationships, he eventually qualified. Damien’s being in a train refers to the way in which he goes through life in a mechanical disconnected way. His struggles have been a triumph, in the best sense of the word, over his masochistic grandiosity.
