The "basic rule" of psychoanalysis gives rise to a therapeutically effective communication which is limited as well as extended in specific ways. The authors endeavor to differentiate this from everyday communication, which aims at complementarity and presupposes the avoidance of all that is "forbidden." In the psychoanalytic situation the analysands' social competence is artificially restricted: their wishes remain unfulfilled and their habitual strategies of communication, with which they attempt to reaffirm the congruence of expectations, are foiled. The psychoanalytic reservation concerning communication is institutionalized in this way in order to restructure the relation between socially conforming and noncommunicable knowledge.