Maria Grazia Oldoini’s paper, “Abusive Relations and Traumatic Development: Marginal Notes on A Clinical Case,” is a comprehensive treatise on the effects of trauma on the ability to form a sense of Self where the patients’s entire experience in the world is not unduly oriented towards the satisfaction of the other’s abusive and impinging needs. She postulates the search for a transformational object as the tragic core factor driving the repetitive traumatic enactments characteristic of people like her patient Greta. The author locates this search in the repetition of what she calls a “traumatic holding environment,” which I find to be an intriguing, but problematic, idea. I offer an alternative explanation based on a careful review of Winnicott’s holding concept and Bion’s theory of thinking.