A comparison of the aesthetic underpinnings of psychoanalytic praxis is undertaken using Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies. Drawing from Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Jung, and Stephen Mitchell as well as research and theory from the study of infant-parent interaction, the author offers a clinical case to illustrate a perspective that gives more emphasis to Dionysian forces in psychoanalytic activity than in traditional case reporting, thus illustrating the utility of such an expansion of underlying assumptions for psychoanalytic praxis. The perspective highlights the importance of attention to “faintly conscious stimuli” on nonsymbolized embodied registers of interaction for their significance in the communication of affective meanings.