The article is an argument for the relevance for our understanding of the pedagogic relationship of Freud’s discovery of transference. Commonalities between teaching and psychoanalysis are reviewed prior to a discussion of how the concept of transference might be applied to teaching, particularly to improving the teacher’s ‘psychologicalmindedness’. The article concludes by considering the moral/professional issue of teachers making use of the transference processes at work in their classrooms. The main thing about schools is that they are one of the very few remaining public interactional spaces in which people are still engaged with each other in the reciprocal, though organisationally patterned, labour of producing meaning indeed, the core meaning of self-identity (Wexler 1992: 10).