The wound in the analyst is not a liability to be overcome before practice can begin — it is the credential. What Samuels is pressing against is the clinical fiction of a sanitized professional self, the idea that healing flows from the well toward the sick. That fiction is itself a spiritual bypass: if I am healthy enough, credentialed enough, analyzed enough, I will not be implicated in what sits across the room from me. The analyst who presents wholeness presents a lie, and the lie does double damage — it seals off the analyst's own suffering from the work, and it locks the patient into the role of one who lacks what the other possesses.

The patient carries an inner healer. That phrase sounds almost too hopeful until you feel its structural implication: the illness and the healing capacity inhabit the same psyche, simultaneously. The patient is not waiting to receive health from outside; something in them already knows the way — obscured, not absent. What the wound in the analyst opens is the possibility of meeting rather than treatment, of two people inside the same problem, differently placed. The healing that matters tends to move in that direction, not from the clean toward the contaminated, but somewhere in the space between two people who have both been marked.