The author presents his work with two patients who for a prolonged time harbored the certain conviction of a fixed and traumatic future. This was couched in graphic visual imagery of a definite catastrophic event. Trop demonstrates persuasively how he came to interpret these beliefs as concrete representations of actual emotionally significant experiences in the patient's life. These patients had difficulty regulating affect states because of specific deprivations in early child-parent interactions. They tended therefore to memorialize such states as ideas of concrete and affectless events. A productive therapeutic approach to these fixed convictions involves addressing the genesis of the patients' structural deficits and helping them acquire more adaptive ways of organizing affective experiences.