Several clinical vignettes express the unconscious use of the patient's body as containing and enacting a somatic defense until free association enables affect to be found in the clinical setting. In this paper, there is a plea to take the body of the patient as seriously as the mind and language. As Ferenczi eloquently remarked “one needs to have lived through an affective experience, to have, so to speak, felt it in ones body, in order to gain conviction.”