This paper claims that the psychotherapeutic situation is haunted by the erotic transference which arises from the artificial setting of the analysis itself, which, with its care, attention and listening, reinvokes the primal seduction (Laplanche) or transformation (Bollas) of the infant by the mother. Freud wanted to distance himself from seduction, coming to prefer instead the productive work of analysis in a state of deprivation. I argue that modern practitioners and trainings (ironically, seductive in themselves!), responding to consumer demand and fearful of litigation, attempt to remove all risk from the ‘professional’ setting of the therapy. Here, the great danger is the loss of the radical anarchic otherness of the unconscious, indeed the endless play of seduction itself, which alone animates the heart of the analytic process. Finally, psychosis is equated with the loss of seduction, as is our current cultural fascination with IT - cool seduction (Baudrillard).