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It is precisely in »crises of contact« (Will, 2023) that the analytic session gives rise to pronounced, sometimes even rousing and enveloping reveries, which are often confusing – but can be of great value for restoring contact between analyst and patient and for understanding what is happening internally. In psychoanalytic discourse, such reveries are often associated with so-called unrepresented states. This paper, which is based on clinical material, explores this question and – on the basis of the theory of forms of interaction according to Lorenzer and Zepf – suggests how such states could be understood metapsychologically. Freud (1894a) had spoken of a »much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all« (p. 58, translation of P. S.). According to my suggestion, this kind of defence mechanism is aimed at the subject's affects as the basic structures of the psyche, by which the associative traffic of preconscious thought is suspended at the traumatic focal points of mental activity. In the moment of psychoanalytic reverie, these discarded thought processes are vicariously taken on: They approach the analyst's ego and form the starting point for further speech at the edge of the unspeakable.
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