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Between «innocent eye» and «armed vision», the analytic mind is already inhabited in the analytic encounter by a network of traces left by the history of its identifications (and of what has previously been laid down within it) which supports a first, incipient configuration of sense. The analytic mind is also inhabited by theories, which it uses to conceptualise what happens in the session. If these its inhabitants remain «free guests of the inner world», from which provisional constructions and «auxiliary representations» originate, they can guarantee the encounter by carrying out a fundamental «Oedipal function of the mind», a triangulation, a laboratory that is able to create a space for newness and for negative capability, tolerating the unknown. If these inhabitants turn into identificatory fetishes and rigid systems, they become an obstacle. Reflecting on «how» theories work within the analyst's mind does not replace the issue of «what» (which theories?), but it opens up an area to be explored: under what conditions does the theory become a mind armour? Analysts involved in training have a responsibility to moderate trainees' idealisations and narcissistic investments (and their own), in discouraging imitators, acolytes, and followers and in enhancing plurality and partiality in different points of view.
KEY WORDS: Cat's cradle, inner family of the analyst, negative capability, psychoanalytic mind, theory.