In Blake’s image of the good and evil angels fighting for a “child” we see the dramatis personae that make up an archetypal defensive structure I have called the “self-care-system.” This dynamic structure, which saves the soul at the expense of “possession by a Spirit”, creates great difficulties in the psychotherapy of trauma survivors who often show a pathological attachment to their inner objects and intense ambivalence about the suffering necessary to come into being as whole persons. In this lecture we will explore this conundrum as it manifests in the transference, employing both clinical and mythological examples.