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The present paper focuses on the implications of experiences with autistic and primitive mental states to our understanding of obsessionality. The author highlights the role played by early loss and a precocious awareness of separateness, in the withdrawal to obsessional thinking and verbosity, as well as to an illusion of omnipotent control of the object. Moreover, obsessionality is seen as attempts at a massive simplification of experience, in order to deal with the pain inherent in the encounter with the intense emotional experience and with the separateness of the enigmatic object which is not under one's omnipotent control. It is suggested that interpretations focusing on conflicting desires, or those linking repressed and displaced parts of the personality with the defenses against them, do not reach these patients in a way that facilitates psychic change. Rather, the author advocates working at primitive, non-symbolic levels of mental functioning, where experience cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically interpreted, but must first be lived in the here-and-now of the analysis. This is illustrated through the analysis of an individual trying to cope with the experience of early loss by deadening emotion and finding shelter in obsessionality.