We dream of fear of dying, corpses, threatening figures. Corpses come to life, creaking, trying to move with rusty hinges. Dead spots. Killers and rapists threaten to overpower us in dreams. Fear of being overpowered permeates psychic life. I don’t think any of us survive infancy or childhood fully alive. What lives survives on graves of self that didn’t make it. We leave a lot behind to be what we are now, to be what we can be. We cover not only nakedness but annihilation. We try to look better than we are, more alive, more appealing. We try to mask a sense of an annihilated self with signs of life. *** Marlene speaks about someone who wears tons of make-up to hide her scary, broken face. Emboldened by their contact and driven by need, this person comes in one day without makeup and shows herself as she is. Chilling, bloodcurdling, necessary. She shows her ravaged self to the one person who can take it. No, incorrect. Marlene may not be able to take it. She shows herself whether or not Marlene can take it. That is closer. To risk in therapy what no one can take. The human race has not This paper draws on a Psy Broadcasting System (PsyBC) online seminar I gave in May 2005, “Faith and Destructiveness.” The seminar was based on two readings, “Killers in Dreams” (Chapter 7 in Emotional Storm) and “A Basic Rhythm” (Chapter 2 in The Sensitive Self ). My concern was to bring out viral aspects of our psychic life and ways we interact with them. An important thread that emerged clustered around “the annihilated self,” a theme that spontaneously grew out of the postings. I have brought some of the postings together here and let them play off each other, adding to, enriching, and complicating our need to meet and make room for our annihilated selves. The people I quote gave full permission to use their postings.