Today, Sebastian was late again, but Martin suspected that he would turn up eventually. Pure absence was too stark to express his current turmoil and, even if being late was the beginning of the attack, he would probably need to attack Martin in more detail. He had missed sessions before, but then a routine kicked in: Martin rang the halfway house where Sebastian lived and told the staff that he hadn’t turned up; he was either informed that Sebastian refused to come or, when he returned from his wanderings, told that he was back safely. If he didn’t come in person, the projection of his sense of abandonment, privation and unreliability found no real home, whereas when he did turn up, it found a resting place of sorts. Not that Sebastian wanted to have his symptoms removed, any more than he wanted an amputation, but he was tempted by being able to express them in a more targeted way: punching the doctor who was proposing to cut off his arm. Nobody came to such a painful and distorted state of mind unless clarity was the more terrifying alternative. Even the most collaborative and well-informed neurotic patient had some resistance, but in those cases the price of abandoning an archaic defence was a wave of anxiety, or the renunciation of a cherished self-image; for the schizophrenic patient, it felt as if the price of abandoning psychosis would be annihilation. Sebastian had tried undermining the therapy again and again. In the early days, he would come in, after taking extra anti-psychotics, claiming to be cured. Now, six months later, he came in to act out.