Psychoanalytic case study research is a difficult process. It evokes and repeats feelings, unconscious strivings, and enactments experienced with the patient, as well as conflicts and feelings about research and writing endemic to the researcher. When working with very regressed, preverbal patients, patients on the primitive edge, the researcher may find the experience difficult to endure. Many students get bogged down in this process and have trouble developing a research question or carrying out the data analysis. Examples are given of how to utilize transference and countertransference dynamics to formulate a question that investigates the patient's core conflict.