Using Kafka's short story A Country Doctor and clinical examples as vehicles, the author demonstrates the centrality of psychoanalysts' styles and life experiences to the psychoanalytic process. Albeit charged with a distinct facilitative task, psychoanalysts inevitably bring their qualities as “fellow sufferers” (to use D. M. Orange's term) into their sessions. They experience pressures placed upon them as the “subject presumed to know,” as Lacan describes. They encounter the ubiquity of self-deception, facing many unknown and unpredictable elements as they surrealistically travel through time with their patients. While understandably wanting to take refuge from their vulnerability, psychoanalysts cannot escape the influence of their individualistic and idiosyncratic natures on the transformational encounters they facilitate.