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In the course of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a five-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and profound developmental delay, there came a time when my reverie experiences often included memories of Tarkovsky’s autobiographical cinematic free-verse Mirror. These reverie experiences became forms in which I was able to contain the patient’s state of nothingness associated with her undifferentiated state, and to recognise her urgent need for mirroring of her very existence. In response to these reveries, I came to think of Winnicott’s ideas on mirroring. I propose the idea that birth can be understood as a trope of the most primordial sense of mirroring, created by the link with a subjective object. I describe the ways in which failures in the caregiver’s reverie hamper the infant’s psychological birth, which relies on good-enough mirroring for him to experience himself in the caregiver’s responses to him. When this fails, what emerges is a chimeric ghost-self, a self merged with the caregiver’s trauma or loss. This chimeric ghost is a product of the distortions in the reflected image. The infant will not be able to be born as himself until he can differentiate from the ghost. In order to avoid identification with the ghost, the nature of the parental trauma needs to be understood by patient and therapist, each helping the other in this transformative experience.