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The author suggests, through the presentation of clinical material extracted from the analysis of a highly inhibited seven-year-old patient, an examination of the concept of imaginative elaboration, which is a central concept in Winnicott’s work, but scarcely broached in the literature. According to Winnicott’s indications, and to the author, imaginative elaboration is primarily the psychic activity that starts trying to fill up, without ever succeeding, the gap between the patient’s need of making his/her transference be taken in first and the analyst’s attempt to receive it, the gap between “the patient’s need to be known in all his/her parts,” and the obstacles that hinder for the analyst his/her capacity to keep himself/herself alive, awakened and in a condition allowing this to happen.