Sandford raises questions regarding the ways in which patients 'use' illness, including malignancy. Thirty-seven at the time analysis began, this impoverished man presented profound obsessional, paranoid, and delusional material. Only after seven years of analysis could he renounce the governmental financial benefits on which he had for many years subsisted and undertake a business venture in which he quickly achieved considerable success. Within a year thereafter he developed lung cancer from which he died in a matter of months. The analysis strongly suggested that he had 'split himself and his mother into two: the external good all-supplying breast (his successful business), and the internal bad cancer breast. When he felt that the destruction (of the bad inside) was complete within, he could say "all is now goodness" and became one with the ideal mother' (in death). Lewin's work on elation is relevant here: terminal ecstasy, sleep, and the libidinization of death meant to this patient being blotted out in perfect union with the mother.