The choice of a career is sometimes a natural and easy decision, sometimes the result of one or more inner conflicts. Some vocations selected as solution to a conflict may, however, aggravate rather than resolve the problem, and unfortunately the discovery that this is the case may occur only after the lapse of many years, when any change would cause a major dislocation. Art, the church, and psychoanalysis are among the professions one can know only after such years of investment. Among the major determinants for the choice of analysis is the capacity for insight, with the conviction that knowing is better than not knowing, and an implicit faith in the adaptive potential of the intelligence. One of the stresses upon the analyst is his becoming the object of intense and sustained demand for magical performance. Another is the disillusionment that comes with the awareness of the limited efficacy of insight. To retreat into dogma is a temptation: one