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The current range of patients taken into analysis includes borderline patients with a mixture of neurotic and characterological symptoms. The latter symptoms sometimes require a modification of the treatment setting to avoid an intensification of the characterological kernel of the illness. The author maintains, however, that manipulations of the formal elements of the setting run the risk of intensifying characterological formations. He offers the hypothesis that if the language of the analysand fails to bring in psychologically useful representations of important material, the productions of the analyst can set up a sonoric and visual space which provokes a more archaic mode of direct reliving of these same representations. This modulation of the setting by the analyst's words affects nonverbal aspects of the preconscious. It has been discussed under various names by many theorists, and is in direct line with some of Freud's reflections in "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through." He suggests that this is a mode of acting on the setting, enriching the word representations of the preconscious. Some have spoken of the analyst as the guardian of the setting, but the setting is just as much the guardian of the analyst and the analysis. The rules of the setting guarantee the relative countertransferential neutrality of the analyst.