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The author analyzes the artistic staging of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller. She shows how choreographic language can represent certain aspects of the psychological processes at work in unsymbolized experiences of loss and unprocessed anxieties about loss: autistic, manic, and melancholic positions are represented in the piece, as well as the compulsion to repeat and the transformative potential of reenactment. From the content of the piece, the author broadens the perspective to its role as a vehicle of transmission within Tanztheater, and as a medium for working through the loss associated with the choreographer’s death. The recent “recreation” of Café Müller, blending generations of dancers and involving the audience in the experience of transformative repetition, opens up inspiring avenues of reflection on the current crisis facing other institutions, such as psychiatry.