Survivors of massive psychic trauma frequently experience deficits in symbolic functioning affecting the capacity to dream and to think productively. Clinicians working with survivors also find themselves struck thoughtless, unable to reflect on the horrors their patients describe. The writer argues that experiencing an initial state of incoherence might be a necessary condition of the healing process when analysts work with this population. It is in the struggle to overcome this state and to become thinking professionals again that they can start to bear witness to the patient's experience. And it is through this work with the analyst's containing presence that the survivor ceases to be a mute observer to her own loss, starts to recapture her thinking self, and begins the process of witnessing her own survival.