Verbal communication is the medium that makes psychoanalysis possible. However, for some patients, verbal thought is linked to early traumatic experience so that it is difficult for them to use speech to reveal their inner needs. As a form of resistance, their communication obscures rather than facilitates an understanding of their inner experience. The patient's unimaginative use of speech and the need to maintain the gap between thought and experience are clinical signs of this defensive organization. Such resistance presents a serious challenge to the analyst who must help the patient achieve an integration of experience and thought amid the shifting flow of free association and objectifying ideas characteristic of the analytic process.