This paper presents certain aspects of the analytic process that emerged in work with an adolescent boy who, for lack of better diagnostic specificity, had come to feel as though he was a psychological orphan. The paper describes how viewing his rageful outbursts in the treatment sessions as a special protest of desperate hope, with an optimistic view of the boy's psychic future, enabled me to view the targets of his rage in part as intensified reflections of his own despairing feelings of vulnerability and helplessness.