ABSTRACT
Freud's newly invented professional figure is an ordinary person serving an artificial or "as-if" role in a fiduciary engagement. It could be argued that every loss is in some sense untimely, but a particular kind of untimely loss is in the fabric of the psychoanalytic engagement, defined by its conceptual framework. The psychoanalytic situation is indeed an audacious endeavor, for a time placing one human being as if at the center of another's emotional life. The analyst, in safe-keeping the position of analyst, becomes a human medium, serving as all other people, but with a disciplined attention and safety attained by this one, particular mortal in this one, peculiar situation. A therapist's humanness is of course no more extricable from his or her professional functioning than is the human idiosyncrasy of any parent or teacher separable from their acquired skills. Rather, that humanness is the foundation upon which the work rests.
