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The author addresses “primitive states of mind”, a significant point of current development in contemporary psychoanalysis, with the aim of recognising and elaborating such configurations in the analytic relationship. The article revisits the views of Loewald (1980), who saw minds as organising experiences gradually over the course of development according to different principles and changeable organisational structures which continue to operate simultaneously in adult experience on a continuum that runs from consciousness to unconsciousness. The author uses a clinical example to describe various modalities that succeed in approaching these pre-conditions of thinkability so that as the analysis progresses it can set up the conditions for an affective tolerability, which may in turn lead to a potentially effective recognition of meanings. The article hypothesises that in these circumstances it may be possible to recreate the experience of a phase of development in which the patient “uses” the analyst (Winnicott 1967) as the infant does the mother, in such a way as to put the analyst in the state of feeling “destroyed” (Ogden 2016b). An analyst who survives while “feeling they have been destroyed” in fact enables the patient to live as a subject distinct from an object.