This paper aims to highlight some of the contributions Herbert Rosenfeld made to the theory of how psychoanalysis works. Taking Rosenfeld's first psychoanalytic paper as a starting point the author suggests that his technique was rooted in trying to make the patient aware by verbal interpretation of his psychic reality as he experienced it in the session with his analyst. Four of Rosenfeld's theoretical contributions for helping clearly to conceptualize the patient's psychic reality are then outlined: his ideas about narcissism, projective identification, the role of history and external reality and his optimistic insistence that no matter how different it may seem the patient is always trying to communicate his predicament.