We support the idea that transmission in psychoanalysis is much more about the capacity for rediscovery and reinvention in the practice of each treatment, than about the reproduction of a body of knowledge or a technique, whatever its theoretical underpinnings. A polysemous notion, transmission in many ways eludes the conscious and unconscious desire to transmit, and rests on an illusion conducive to transformational processes whose effects can only be measured after the fact. This second stage of the process, as is also the case in therapy, brings meaning to the first stage. A link is proposed with the transmission between mother and child, and the illusion that is a condition of it. The question of repetition is approached from the angle of traumatic suspension and the acquisition of novelty. The first clinical vignette deals with the blocking of a family transmission. Another briefly illustrates the question of the second time through the resumption twenty years later of an analytic treatment.