Chiron's wound never heals — and that is precisely what makes him a teacher rather than a technician. The logic of the healer who has been cured, who stands on the other side of suffering and extends a hand back across the threshold, is a comforting story. It is also, almost always, a spiritual bypass: the healer's own pain quietly converted into credential, the wound closed enough to feel manageable, the regression foreclosed by the very competence it once cost to acquire. What Samuels is pointing at runs opposite to that. The analyst brings the open wound into the room. Not as confession, not as self-disclosure, but as structural fact — the analyst is still in it, still susceptible, still capable of being reached by what reaches the patient.

The temenos holds this precisely because it permits regression, which is another way of saying: it permits the giving up of the story that one has already arrived. Over-consciousness — the armoring of interpretation, the fluency that answers before it listens — is what the analytic setting is designed to interrupt. Not only in the patient. Chiron did not become a healer despite being incurable. He became one because incurability kept him honest about what healing actually is.