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After meeting a hospitalized patient, we came to question the meaning of repeated suicidal behaviors. We began to understand these actualizations of thoughts, which permitted the patient to avoid situations of separation, as speech acts that resonated with his psychological trauma. The care facility provided a space for listening that enabled us to make a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, after examining the patient’s biography and recent medical history. Psychotherapy has allowed the patient to work through these repeated attempts, now understood as forms of “acting out” rather than as passages to the act, and to make sense of them in terms of the working out of repressed emotions.