Using a psychoanalytic approach, I demonstrate how I was able to uncover the keen longing for attachment that lay underneath David's unrelated and alienating behaviors—behaviors that repelled his peers and made him an unmanageable puzzle for his parents and teachers. My clinical notes (from a two-and-a-half year treatment of once-a-week sessions), indicate the gradual process of guiding him into play by introducing first dialogue and then characters into his mechanized rituals until he begins to tell his own story. Over time, this experience of reciprocity enabled David to feel safe and empowered in the external world, where formerly he had been a helpless and angry outcast. An unplanned early termination first threatens to interrupt his progress but ultimately provokes an unexpected demonstration by David of what he had learned.