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Judy Eekhoff's Trauma and Primitive Mental States is a work of remarkable breadth, depth, and clarity that will appeal to a wide audience, from novice to advanced practitioners. Too often I hear from colleagues just beginning their analytic training, that a talk that they have heard was way above their heads, or “I need to get the paper and study it to understand what the speaker was saying.” Psychoanalysts have developed an insular language used in their scholarly communications which can sound like “psychobabble” to the secular or novice public, having been left impressed with the language but confused about the message. In this regard, I was impressed with the clarity of Eekhoff's writing but also her depth of understanding primitive mental states, and communicating her research in a simple yet sophisticated manner. Her writing style is quite unique, inviting the reader to witness how she processes intersubjective clinical experiences moving from the semiotic to semantic and symbolic representations of primitive mental states that present in the consulting room. She weaves ideas by Freud, Ferenczi, Bion, Klein, Green, Ogden and others, together with her own clinical observations into a tapestry comprising a harmonious mix of conceptual and empirical observations transcending both into an aesthetic sense of the primitive mental state. We are invited to be the “fly on the wall” observing analyst and analysand experiencing each other in the consulting room. Undigested yet somatically registered experiences surface from the non-repressed unconscious, inflicting the analytic couple with terror and suffering long ago imprinted on the body ego, but resurrected in the consulting room. The couple struggle to symbolically represent presented and re-presented experience in fractals of the turbulent caesura between the semiotic and the semantic. Repeating patterns, behaviors, emotional states and physical eruptions, present themselves for study in the analytic space, and a n