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Based on a fragment from the analysis of a woman who developed a lymphoma during her analysis, the author suggests considering the irruption of the ‘actual’ in an analytic process as a collapse in the reverie of the analytic pair. He forms the hypothesis that this kind of collapse repeats an early breakdown experienced in the mother–child relationship and that a severe somatisation emerging during an analysis belongs to the register of the ‘actual 1’ described by Scarfone, while the transference–countertransference breakdown of the reverie of the analytic pair belongs to the register of the ‘actual 2’. The author puts forward a psychosomatic perspective based on Bion’s theory of thinking, on the concepts of ‘psychosomatic breast’ and ‘alexithymic breast’.