Therapeutic action cannot be conceptualized in a precise theoretical model. «Only the openings and end-games admit of an exhaustive systematic presentation», wrote Freud. Therapeutic action looks more like an adventure than a procedure. Two aspects that characterize «good enough» therapeutic action, among others, are the capacity to develop hope and the use of metaphor. Distinct from certainty and born of anxiety and doubt, hope is a powerful transformative factor. It has no object, it is a utopian tension, and it is unsaturated; it disturbs the fundamentalist certainties of the unconscious which are subject to the repetition compulsion, activating potentialities directed at the unknown. The use of metaphor is the linguistic expression of the disturbing function of hope. Metaphor opens the experience of the analytic relationship to surprise, surmounting the conceptual barriers of patient and analyst that risk suffocating it.