Psychoanalysis was linked, since its very beginning, to the building-up of a communicative relationship, the creation of a basis of understanding between individuals who, at first, do not necessarily understand each other. This non-understanding may be caused by the peculiarity, strangeness and the bizarrery of the symptomatic or of the personal appearance of a patient, or cultural differences in the narrower or the broader sense may be responsible for it. Furthermore, the anticipations raised by the analyst and the peculiarity of the psychoanalytic situation may often seem strange and unfamiliar to the patient. The significance of the effort in establishing a communicative basis between partners having each its own personal history and originating from different social and cultural roots becomes even more evident when it comes to the discussion of the therapeutic technique to use in difficult, may be pre-oedipal pathologies. Here, it will probably not be the primary scope to lead the patient to insights, at least for a long part in the course of the therapy, but to aim at attaining the ability to experience himself as a competent communicative individual in an exchange relation with the analyst. Then, the therapist will not be, in the first place, the understanding, interpreting, persuading partner, he will not only be the holding partner but also a listening one whose basic attitude will aim at creating a free space in which the patient will be able to articulate his own imaginative world.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)