Howard Levine, MD: Psychoanalysis is ‘the talking cure,’ but the problems raised by language are complex, paradoxical, and perhaps unsolvable. At their most effective, words play a vital role in psychic homeostatic regulation and the psychoanalytic process that is analogous to the architecturally structural role played by the keystone of an arch. The problem, however, is that words can be used to reveal or conceal, to convey meaning or obscure, distort, hide, fragment, or evacuate meaning. And sometimes the very nature of language falls short of being able to capture and adequately communicate the psychic dimensions of our emotional lives. This paper explores the limitations and possibilities of words and language in psychoanalysis from the perspective of the work of Freud, Bion and Green and ends with a coda from the writings of an analysand.