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The fruit of fifteen years of clinical experience with cancer patients—a specialization intimately tied to a “climate” where everything is taken “en masse”—lead inexorably to considering time as being central to the therapeutic relationship with a cancer patient. This relationship is marked initially by the break in the illusion of identity, produced by the shock of the diagnosis thrown upon the patient. Later, during remission, there is the failure of the superficial substitute identity provided by the “framework effect” of long-term treatments. All along there are indications that point out the need for a renewal of clinical analysis in cancerology: from a theoretical “bricolage,” to especially difficult transference issues, to conceptualizing what is happening in terms of “loss of the self,” rather than simply working through a painful bereavement process.