In this article, a student in psychoanalytic training responds to the book Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice & Queer Theory by reflecting upon his personal experience with queerness and the psychoanalytic institute. He describes an journey that repeatedly brings him into conflict with the essentialist, heteronormative presuppositions of the authorities that aim to qualify him as a psychoanalyst. He ventures a “reparative” reading of passages from Melanie Klein and Donald Meltzer and draws upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument that there is a need for reparative reading practices (informed by Klein’s theory of the depressive position) to complement the predominant “paranoid reading” practices in critical theory.