Throughout this five-year treatment, my experience with Gazi, a first-year university student, who began treatment at age 17, helped me better understand the cumulative effect of culture on the development of the self. This period corresponded closely to the initial years of my journey in self psychology when I was working in the counseling center of a private university. This paper describes the self-psychological journey of a young Turkish man who has found no one in his family to idealize, and yet fully absorbs his family's idealization of the Turkish hero, Ataturk, and their desire to have their son become like him.