A young man came up to Oxford six years ago, sent to analysis by his counsellor mother, saying that he did not intend to stay long but had come only to see what it was like, but sure the place was full of snobs. He was a well-built but rather coarse-looking fellow, speaking in a rather rough way with a heavy working-class accent: not in keeping, he admitted, with his family culture. He had obtained a place to read Human Sciences, to everyone's amazement for he'd never worked at school. He sported a nose ring and looked generally uncouth.

However he did stay, obtained a first-class honours and generally improved in appearance over the next six years, transforming after an abortive attempt at a doctorate, into a medical student. The nose ring disappeared, the accent improved and the clothing became cleaner but the analytical work was a sticky affair. The central problem, silence, relieved only by a good recall of dreams, revealed itself as a consequence of a lack of interest in anything other than sex and boozing. He did very little studying and got a