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If psychoanalysis is first and foremost a romance of the familiar, then its simultaneous role as a theory of therapeutic change might appear incongruous, if not contradictory. Nevertheless, much attention has been paid, in the years following Freud's death, to the development of a psychoanalytic theory of the mechanisms of change, although the psychoanalytic study of the aesthetics of change (according to Freud's use of the term, in which “aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling” [S. Freud, 1919/1955b, p. 219]) has been less thoroughly attended to. It is to this latter sort of psychoanalytic account of change that this article speaks. Specifically, the author inquires into the forms and genesis of one particular aspect of the psychoanalytic aesthetics of change, which arises when the patient's progress in psychotherapy arouses a sense that she or he is leaving behind a more disturbed version of herself or himself, for a new and largely unfamiliar one, with intolerable consequences.