n this article, we share some aspects of our conversations about the dissertation as a context for personal and professional development. Our two voices reflect from our diff erent positions as family therapy graduate and programme leader. We explore the metaphor of dissertation as generative relationship which can scaff old transformation in personal and professional 'selves'. We have invited the editor's artistic licence to illustrate the article and John Burnham to add his voice as an extended context for multi-vocal generativity Cedric: My transforming relationship with my dissertation 'Some relationships start o with candlelit dinners, lead to heart-beating excitement and the uncertainty of where it might go next and then plunge explosively into wild sex. Not ours. We started in the library. I was feeling low. Some bad experiences had got me thinking that I was emotionally illiterate and insensitive. Could I be these things? Ignoring the mood and the self-deprecation, she led me gently to the bookshelves. I li ed out several books and together we poured over them, taking copious notes. en following assorted writers' ideas, we searched pools of journals, throwing key words into internet search engines, hoping this would gradually lead us upstream to nuggets of wisdom about emotion and feeling. In our clumsy uncertain fumbling with scraps of ideas, stitched and jumbled together, patched here and there, I began to wonder if we could ever discover anything by reviewing the literature or devising our li le vigne es together. Were we just starry eyed and navel gazing? In these early stages we were companions, hardly aware of each other, yet together keeping solitude out of the lonesome task ahead and dulling its pain. Looking back, I wonder how much that relationship changed me and what we actually achieved by being together. Some memories are a blur. Others are bright and shiny. I look back on what happened between us as a time when I shared some of the intimate details of my past and present relationships. Yet I shared also of the more public me, of my relationships with my clients and my responsiveness to their feelings in particular. Rather than my telling of these things, we communed through the black and white of the printed word. When I wrote, I knew I had been heard because the words were inscribed and visible. Once that had taken place, the words seemed to dance, move and mingle with each other and then amazingly re ect back other connected but new, refreshing ideas. I heard these as new whispered possibilities. My heartbeat quickened because somehow in this process, from within the unknown space that existed between us, we were creating and discovering new aspects of ourselves and doing it together. e thrill of being connected was mostly in this experience of creating together, new ideas emerging from the space between us. It is what I miss most about there not being an 'us' now. It's all over now and I am le with realisations about myself, our creations and thoughts about the process.