In psychosis and borderline states annihilation has occurred, ego nuclei are functioning but separate, id and ego have not fused, distinction between self and not-self is absent. To analyze these areas means to go back to a not-yet-personalized state and experientially go through annihilation and death, then come back again, but differently. Classical analysis is appropriate whenever it is practical. When it is not, parameters are appropriate. Success depends on how far we, despite our anxiety, can live by the very things we are trying to get our patients to accept: that everything has ambivalency, that normal and pathological come from the same place, that psychic reality is as important as factual reality.