There are two crucial passages in Freud's “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” that require the analyst to think about entities in the mind while at the same time thinking about the mind as a continuum of activity. Although that is a challenging paradox, the passage that allows the analyst to find discrete memories in the patient's continuous behavior was easily absorbed into psychoanalytic custom. In the reverse direction, however, the description of the patient finding his way from the analyst's discrete interpretations to his own continuous experience of strain was most often pasted over with superfluous platitudes. A practical reason for this aversion is suggested.