Cure is a topic much on our minds but rarely in focus. This paper probes what systematizes this protean thing called cure, hoping to open it to new meaning. It reveals cure as a moving target; illustrates several ways of putting a working definition together; and, while reflecting on three treatments, considers cure as both state and process. Cure's vernacular definition is not unknown to analysts: recovery from illness, a state of well-being restored. But psychoanalysis also deems the mind's heart a rupture that does not heal: if we are our scars, then there is no return to a state of continuous well-being, because none never existed. In both daily clinical life and the long run, as some clinical examples illustrate, we cannot choose between these two meanings, but must rather operate in the difficult tension, the irony, between them.