Rodrigué uses the metaphor of the title to discuss his twenty-five years of experience as a practicing analyst. Analysis in becoming more respectable, has lost its revolutionary spirit. Thinking is good, while action always borders on acting out. Change is regarded with suspicion. There is often significant ambiguity between the patient's wish for cure and the analyst's aim to 'seek the truth and transform a person'. To see the clinical analytic setting as research and treatment as experimentation is an unfortunate distortion of rationalization. Finally, the author comments on the confusion between clinical and metapsychologic theory, often leading to a spurious idealization of metapsychology, based only tangentially on clinical observations.