This fictional account of a teenage girl's treatment is based on the author's experience of working with troubled young people. He shows how cases of self-harm and antisocial behaviour can be helped not only by an understanding of the intra-psychic world, but by a therapeutic regime based on psychodynamic principles. In residential treatment there are opportunities for adolescents to learn from relationships with staff, peers and educational input but sometimes they are wasted by the repetition of abuse. While psychoanalytic psychotherapy by itself may be insufficient for a young person in need of a more comprehensive residential treatment, nevertheless psychodynamic concepts may make significant contributions to the process of therapeutic change.