This study addresses a central conundrum in psychoanalytic practice and investigation: how does the analyst grasp the unconscious meaning and intent underlying his patient's productions? Drawing on a range of psychoanalytic scholarship, as well as my own experience, I am proposing a hypothesis that may partially account for this process. The hypothesis focuses on sensory illusions that the analyst experiences at critical moments in the course of analysis. Sometimes the illusions are simple ones: the analyst has a momentary feeling of being hot or cold or that time is standing still. They may be more complex: the analyst has a distorted image of himself. He may feel small, powerless, and incompetent, or large, powerful, and brilliant. My hypothesis is that these illusions are understandable consequences of patterns of the patient's behavior. Often, but not