The author draws on his own experience of traumatized states to explicate what he calls the ontological unconscious—the loss of one's sense of being. He proposes that it is in the process through which emotional experience comes into language that the sense of being is born, and that the aborting of this process brings a loss of the sense of being. The loss and regaining of one's sense of being are profoundly context-dependent, hinging on whether the intersubjective contexts of one's living prohibit or welcome the coming into language of one's emotional experiences.