In this paper, the author explores moments of incoherence and confusion in the analysand; moments when the analyst is unable to understand, feels alienated and may even slip into lethargy. The clinical material is taken from the analysis of a female patient. The period presented is dominated by incoherence, confusion, unfinished sentences on the part of the patient. The interpretations dealt with her tendency to create a relationship devoid of aliveness. In trying to understand the struggle of both sides of the analytic dyad with aliveness and deadness as well as the patient's effort to experience her analyst as a transformational object, the analyst had to rely on his own reveries. Bion's work on the ability of the mother-child relationship to transform the unbearable primitive sensations is the starting point of the theoretical framework. The author is concerned with the ideas developed in Bollas' work on the unthought known and the transformational object as well as the way in which Ogden presents the rôle of the analyst's reveries in grasping the inchoate part of the psyche.