ABSTRACT
The treatment of patients with serious difficulties in symbolization is a riddle. How can we find a way to communicate with someone whose representational function is seriously impaired, to the extent that he is not able to give a personal meaning to experience? How can we begin to build some threads from experiences, however small, of sharing emotions, and then weave them with and for the patient into a fabric of thoughts? If repairing deficits in symbolization and representation depends upon intersubjective relationships and the patient is tenaciously avoiding every kind of contact, how can treatment go forward? It is my belief that an emotional connection can only be born out of living—or better, out of suffering—the same things, out of a moment of intersubjective connection between two separate subjects. But what is to be done when the patient—and sometimes the analyst as well—has no language at their disposal with which to build this connection?
