In the course of training at a comparative psychoanalytic institute, the author fixed upon a technical question: how to find optimal psychological distance from her patients. She struggled to integrate the diverse perspectives that the literature provided on this question. She also became aware of a conflictual phantasy of a polarizing internal mother and father that underlay her interest in the question. A dream about her work with a control patient eventually allowed her, with the aid of both supervisor and personal analyst, to work through the phantasy, and to bring her internal “psychic couple” into creative contact with one another. As a result, her capacity to analyze her patient increased. The author concludes that when supervisors and seminar leaders (in addition to the candidate's analyst) make themselves available to unconscious aspects of a candidate's learning process, institutes provide a more spacious container for psychoanalytic development.