Bollas believed unconscious freedom is the ability to realize one's idiom. In this article, I describe the parallel processes of regaining freedom in this sense in the analyst, the patient and Polish society as a whole. As context, I consider the situation of an analyst in training, and later active in a group of analysts, from the perspective of autonomy and freedom. The analyst's decision to cancel sessions and participate in a demonstration for woman's freedom in a politically challenging situation in Poland proved significant to the treatment of a patient secluded in autistic immobility. I describe how an unintended meeting between psychoanalyst and patient outside the consulting room helped open up contact between them in a way unusual for psychoanalysis. In analysing the possibility of a shift from deadness to a certain life in the patient, which I link to her realising her idiom, I emphasise the significance of both her new experience of being in contact with an analyst who is lively and involved, unlike her mother, as well as the shift towards regaining personal freedom within the psychoanalyst. I called the patient's choice to internally ‘join’ the analyst in her protest ‘an act of the analysand's freedom’.