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If psychoanalysis is the “impossible profession,” popular wisdom and experience suggest that teaching runs it a close second. The teaching and learning of psychoanalysis may thus constitute impossibility squared. The teacher of psychoanalysis can be forgiven for occasionally succumbing to the feeling expressed by Oscar Wilde that “Education is an admirable thing but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,” while the student may occasionally feel that nothing being taught is worth knowing. The experience of what actually transpires between therapist and patient has often seemed unknowable, hidden behind theoretical maxims and therapeutic aphorisms passed down by one generation of analysts to another. Each of us can no doubt recall from our own student days such teaching injunctions as: “analyze from the surface in” or “analyze ego defenses before id contents.” These “analytically correct” approaches seemed so beguiling, providing the anxious student with certainty and clarity. Often, however, when put into practice doubts set in. How, after all, could one be sure what was “surface” and what was “depth” or when did one ever see “ego defenses,” clearly evident and disentangled from mental contents such as drive derivatives that were not also serving defensive functions? Clinical axioms were, for many of us, rooted in the structural theory and, useful as that was, it could sometimes lead in practice