How may desire be disrupted in a person's life and how may it be reclaimed in treatment? To what degree are the dynamics of therapeutic action predicated on the relational aspects of treatment versus time-honored understandings of the reconfiguration of dynamic forces within the psyche? These questions are considered in the context of a discussion of a detailed clinical case. The paper suggests that although much may be gained in the love and the “new outcome” experienced in treatment, an essential function of interpretation is to enable desire to be reclaimed from entrapment in relational demands and obligations from the past and within the treatment relationship. In this manner, analytic treatment mirrors a developmental a trajectory that begins in complex relational exchanges, but from which emerges—in the best of circumstances—an individual whose possession of his or her own mind and desire has derived from, and yet is independent of, the specific relational foundations in which desire was shaped.