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The term "transmission" has been used since 1967 in the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society as a substitute for the expression "didactic analysis." Barande has criticized this term as too much of a synonym for didactic, in that it objectifies and reifies the process around two static poles, the transmitting analyst and the receiving analysand. For him, "didactic" and "transmission" equally misrepresent the singular experience of the discovery of the psychoanalytic process. He suggests that the introduction of the phenomenological concept of transmission into metapsychology runs the risk of making the transmission transference operate as a means of identification with the analyst. He notes wryly that the German term for transmission is the same as that for transference, bertragung. Further confusions and disastrous consequences arise when transmission is made to stand for the psychoanalytic process itself. Not only have we failed to provide a theoretical underpinning for didactic analyses, but we now find transmission set up as the heart of every psychoanalytic process. For Barande, the concepts of transmission and cure are outside the analytic process and apply to it only after the fact; that is, they are phenomenological, not metapsychological concepts. Introducing into the psychoanalytic process a goal, whether it be cure or transmission, can only lead to an impasse, an interminable analysis, in the face of the analyst's countertransference.