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The authors are concerned with the economic and dynamic value of the analyst's capacity for "representability," his ability to use in treatment what Freud called the "sensory power" of the image. By representability they mean the product of waking psychic work comparable to that of the dream, with its regressive course ending in an internal perception similar to that of the hallucinatory experience of the dreamer. The analyst in the treatment of children or adults sometimes has images which can be used to provide a nucleus for representation of certain material and themes. The authors draw on their experience as child analysts working with autistic children with their peculiar experience of "waking sleep." When the first evidences of the capacity for object relatedness develop in these children, their "waking sleep" becomes troubled with cries of distress. According to the Botellas' hypothesis, it is not the loss of the object but the danger of the loss of its representation, and, by extension, the risk of non-representation that signals distress in these children. They illustrate their thesis with some interesting case material. One case concerns a child who was traumatized very early by hospital stays and surgery. The analyst's emphasis on the sights, sounds, and smells of the hospital helped the child organize his early, preverbal experiences. More importantly, as the child struggled with the separation and attendant depersonalization at the end of the session, the mental image of a wolf occurred to the analyst. He communicated this to the child, much as one would tell a story to a child, helping the child organize his distress along the lines of oral aggression. This type of analytic intervention did not formulate the latent content behind a manifest content, but, in the absence of both latent and manifest content, the intervention advanced a preconscious formulation capable of organizing other representations, thus forming a manifest content. The au