ABSTRACT
Spontaneity and surprise! Sometimes these are the gateway to our most pleasurable moments of intimacy with our patients; sometimes they are a Pandora's Box we wished at that moment had remained shut. But each contributes a life force to clinical psychoanalysis without which our work would be as unproductive and uncreative as painting by numbers. All told, I share the view of Steven Cooper (2000), who writes that "at its heart, the analytic process involves risking saying and feeling new things by both patient and analyst" (p. 195), things that will be surprising when they emerge.
