The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a rapid shift from in person to remote psychoanalytic practice. While experienced analysts have described mixed clinical reflections, psychoanalytic candidates occupy a distinctive dual position, conducting analytic work with patients and simultaneously undergoing their own analyses under the same altered conditions. The present study examined the experiences of psychoanalytic candidates during the pandemic. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 candidates. Transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four interrelated themes emerged: rupture and reconfiguration of analytic frame; embodiment, presence and primitive experience; shared trauma, temporality and altered relatedness; and legitimacy, loss and making of meaning. Candidates described how the psychic function of the frame became newly visible when its material supports were withdrawn. The shift to remote work altered the conditions of embodied presence, reshaping countertransference experience and facilitating emergence of more primitive anxieties. The pandemic became a shared traumatic third that disrupted analytic asymmetry, contributing to temporal dislocation and regression. For some candidates, questions of legitimacy arose. Though the period was often experienced as a loss, many candidates found it formative. The continuity of analytic work under conditions of collective threat demonstrated the endurance of analysis, becoming internalised in the formation of analytic identity.