As clinicians, we often seek evidence of patients’ emotional experiences through “positivistic” sensorially based perceptions. In contemporary practice, we are learning how the consequences of early trauma can be mentally represented in negated forms such as blankness, deadness, absences, or gaps. Patients unconsciously use these mech­anisms to psychically defend against painful affects, unformulated or unmentalized experience(s). An inability to hear these silent forms of defenses in the consulting room can result in ruptures or impasses in the treatment relationship. To locate non-symbolic defenses, we rely on our intuition as well as our understanding of “negative representations.”   Sometimes these phenomena are experienced by clinicians as a lack of resonance in the countertransference. Using historical psychoanalytic papers from Freud, Klein, Bion, Green, and Meltzer as background, we will work together in this course to explore how to identify non-symbolic mechanisms originating prior to repression, and expand our clinical capacities to attend to this important material.