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This paper explores the construction of physical and desiring selves by focusing on two themes as they present themselves in two analyses of female patients. First, are the problematics of naming bodies and sexualities; here the complexities of patients'tortured as well as pleasurable experiences of themselves as expressed in their own language of identifications is examined. An appreciation of these taken-for-granted terms, and the inner dialogues which support them, permits the analyst to enter a subjective world of bodies adorned and concealed in words. The second theme highlights how the analyst's communications of his own experience of the patient's naming and identificatory practices allows him to become a subject in the patient's narrative. In this regard I suggest that the transformative power of psychoanalysis requires not only interpretative and empathic modesof understanding, but also relies heavily on the creation of a dialogical relation where the discourse itself affects how bodies, gender, and desire are name and known. This perspective leads to a discussion of the analyst's interventions as “performative speech practices,” and how this constituent of the intersubjective nature of psychoanalysis acts toeither buttress existing structures or to create new habitats.