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“Beta and the Limits of Communication” engages with Charles W. Dithrich’s work on beta communication and osmosis. Dithrich valuably extends beta elements beyond a purely pathological register, contending they can operate prior to phantasy and projective identification. His extension of the concept of beta elements runs the risk, however, of obscuring a core use of beta as it was introduced by Bion. Drawing on Kant’s transcendental method, Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations and Bion’s later clinical writing, this paper argues that Dithrich’s framework presupposes a “grammar of process” between two parties, leading it to miss another “normal” use of beta: as an indicator of limit and as a vehicle of disruption to the very sort of elision characteristic of the perspective taken by Dithrich and others. The paper introduces the concept of “Ur-beta” to mark a distinction between situations where beta elements might serve communicative functions and situations where the very possibility of experience is in question. In the latter situation, the critical issue is not communicating what cannot be said but communicating that something is ineffable, a distinction which Bion takes to bear on work with psychotic patients and engagement with psychoanalytic colleagues.