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The case of an 8-year-old psychotic boy who was taken into residential care with intensive psycho-therapy and discharged uncured at the end of seven months is discussed. The author considers his admission to have been influenced by countertransference factors including rescue phantasies which obscured proper evaluation of the child's illness and the extent to which he would overtax the resources of the institution and the capacity of the staff to remain detached. The child had been the object of attempted murder by his mother some time earlier, and as the child's destructive proclivities emerged in care, acute anxieties were aroused in the staff throughout the institution arising from the death wishes he was able to provoke. These wishes could be shown to centre not only on the child but on those staff members who were most closely responsible for his care. There was some evidence that mother and child had formed a symbiotic relationship in which each stood to the other as the externalization of his own bad nature. His sojourn within the institution had to be terminated (at a point when obsessive defences were in process of emerging) in large part because staff attitudes to those more intimately concerned with his therapy and care failed any longer to discriminate between these workers and the child. He had in fact succeeded in creating a feeling of fusion between himself and his helpers in the minds of the less concerned staff.