The assumptions which predominate in the reading of psychoanalytic theory differ from those involved in listening to the patient in the psychoanalytic process. A weakness of much applied psychoanalysis is that these two sets of assumptions are confused and theoretical certainty is substituted for clinical exploration. This difference in assumptions is illustrated by the different assumptions about the signifier in two poems. In Freud's work on Leonardo, both attitudes toward the signifier are present, but the clinical aspect is located in Freud's method, not in his historical construction. The problems of maintaining a similar clinical stance in applied psychoanalysis are explored, and Freud's tendency toward historical certainty is speculatively considered as an instance of the parallelism phenomenon.