Embarking...

I was struck by the following passage from Michael Parsons's essay, The Analyst's Countertransference to the Psychoanalytic Process:

The start of a new analysis brings a sense, for analyst as well as patient, of embarking on something. Imagine setting out to sail the Atlantic, or dedicating oneself to the study of a language and its culture. One is not just beginning to do something, but engaging with something that extends far beyond oneself. We bring with us what knowledge of sailing or of languages we already have. But the process we have embarked on means putting ourselves into a relationship with ocean or language that will make demands on us. We do not yet know how mild or extreme those demands will be. The ocean, or the language, will test and challenge us, and we are committing ourselves to whatever the relationship with them will turn out to involve. What we embark on as analysts is something that, over the years, we may have come to know quite a lot about. For all that familiarity, however, we also know that it exceeds our comprehension. The psychoanalytic process presents us with a conjunction of the familiar and the mysterious.