Howard Levine discusses the vital role of the analyst’s subjectivity in encounters with patient’s unrepresented states of mind. He describes how the analyst’s use of spontaneity facilitates the emergence of intersubjective acts of figurability enabling the unrepresentable to become accessible to interpretation. Through clinical examples he illustrates some of the limitations of his original working model and discusses how returning to the theories of Freud, Klein and particularly Bion, supported his understanding of such phenomena.