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This patient, coming from a severely traumatizing interpersonal experience beginning with psychological desertion by the father and brutal mistreatment by a stepmother, had no recourse other than to displace to successive environments the expectations which he had acquired in the first one. He really had no reason to believe that life could be predictably friendly; his experiences with benign people were too short-lived to warrant his accepting them as such. It is a real question whether the 'paranoid syndrome', no matter if the expectations of unfriendliness did become somewhat psychotically distorted for a time at the height of the boy's validly justified distress, can justifiably be accounted for by the standard formulations based on homosexuality and the mechanism of projection. The clinical picture, though extending over a rather long period, is really that of a reactive depression, with displacement of hostility which had much of its origin, insofar as it was clinically significant, in the actual life situation. The favorable therapeutic result had less to do with the theoretical formulation than it did