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Drawing on my process notes from the first of seven years of psychotherapy with an eleven year old girl who was referred to me for emotional and cognitive damage stemming from severe early and subsequent deprivation and abuse, the paper examines the nature and impact of interpretations driven by premature and misplaced empathy (a faulty response to the observed manifest level of the child’s emotional state). In contrast with interpretations born out of the counter-transference, those based on premature and misplaced empathy missed the point of the child’s deepest communications. They were unable to transform deeper object-related anxieties and did not reach the child’s as-yet-unthought and unthinkable feeling-states related to early trauma.