The author proposes articulating the basic rule of analysis so as to direct patients' attention to preverbal or non-verbal impressions acquired in earliest infancy, which are otherwise difficult to verbalize. The comparative inacessibility of this domain of early infantile impressions may be explained by reference to the self-protection mechanism of imperceptivity described by S. Lustman. The latter concept seems to correspond to what the present author analyses as an experience of non-feeling. She describes this process as an early precursor of denial reflecting the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis. So long as the realm of early impressions remains cut off from the development of the personality, its creative potential cannot be realized. Cur words can awaken preverbal feeling states via associative connexions; uncontrollable affect charges erupt in the patient. It is the goal of therapy to realign the buried world of early mother–child relations and its affective 'bequest' with the intellectual development of the patient in order to restore that world to language.