Most religious cultures cut out a space from the world, either by consecrating natural borders or by erecting temples. Here special unworldly experiences are thought to become more available. The psychoanalytic frame creates a similar division of space and time, and is similarly open to experiences not possible outside that frame, although the architecture of the psychoanalytic frame is primarily imaginative. The impossible requirements of that frame, which has changed over the years but whose original point of reference is Freud’s fundamental rule of free-association and even-hovering attention, tends to bring forth impasses and perplexities, interpersonal koans not meant to be solved so much as contemplated together in ways that intimate something beyond the face-to-face encounter.