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When I think about Theodor Reik, and I knew him as a member of his seminar, one item remains in my memory with gratitude, and that is the term “the surprised psychoanalyst.” We never find Freud saying “This surprised me very much.” When Reik introduced the concept of surprise, he opened a new door for me. I differentiate between interpretation and construction. An interpretation takes place when the patient is saying something and we grasp that there is something implicit in what our patient said that he or she does not realize. What he or she is saying goes through us, and we realize that we can add something the patient has not understood. The interpretation is something that the patient has evoked in us and comes to us as a surprise. By comparison with interpretation, construction has a different structure. Construction is something therapists learn in school, a standard psychoanalytic finding, which in the therapist evokes no surprise. The patient has said nothing that is in principle new to the therapist but has discovered something well known to us from other cases and the literature. Nothing special has happened between therapist and patient. In making an interpretation therapists never have to worry about the timing. We feel it and say it, and it is appropriate. When it comes to construction, we have a different situation. The therapist understands that the patient has something that he or she understands as a basic psychoanalytic idea but is not yet ready to accept. Worse, the patient will accept the construction, but only as an intellectual idea at that moment; it will have no impact on the patient. Thus the problem. “If I mention it now, I will say a most important thing at a time when the patient cannot make full use of it.” On the other hand, if the therapist waits too long, as