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The analysand stretches out on the couch, no longer upright. The analyst is seated comfortably behind the couch, listening with evenly hovering attention while maintaining a more direct contact with the ground and reality. The place of analysis and the scheduled sessions thus become the theater of a new version of an eternal mythic motif. In this setting, it is ethnopsychoanalysis that informs us. According to Frazer, "divine monarchs and priests" and "young pubescent girls" were subject to similar rules in different cultures: they were forbidden to touch the ground or to cast eyes on the sun. There is an evocative correlation between the suspended, isolated position of such figures and that of analysands, who are asked to raise their feet from the floor and, one might say, to place themselves between heaven and earth. This, in the interest of facilitating the departure from the mundane space/time of consciousness and encouraging abandonment of "earthbound judgment." The couch becomes the means of putting the fundamental rule of analysis into practice. The phenomenon of the margin is of interest in understanding the psychoanalytic setting as a space of change. Using the studies of Vernant, then of Freud and Chasseguet-Smirgel, the author proposes that the analyst and the analysand merge and are confused in the suspended time of analytic rite, and then separate in the hope that the analyzed parts will find different configurations more adapted to reality. The couch gives form to the neutral zone which separates natural science from social science, scientific research from therapy, the contractual relationship from the relationship of transference; this prevents the analyst's office from becoming the monster factory exemplified by H. G. Well's celebrated story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau." The couch represents the limit of the analytic operation, the order between the analyst and the analysand, the asymmetry of the relationship, the terminability of analysi