I see nothing but what I have before me

This paper presents a clinical fragment illustrating the transition towards the creation of psychic material suitable for analysis. Within an intermediary zone between corporal acting, image construction and word representation, the author attempts to report the effects of a patient's symptoms on her own psychic creations as the analytic work unfolds, the latter aiming to anchor the elaborative process in the use of words in order to ward off opposing tendencies taking both analyst and patient away from representation as they approach a traumatic nucleus.