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How do the aporia in our theoretical discourses, the impasses to meaning arising from the ambiguity of words-as-signifiers, occlude the comprehensibility of our clinician's task?

There, buried in the text of Juana Canabel Antokoletz's paper published in our last issue, are found—in the view of Marc Kaminsky—rhetorical matter and a psychoanalytic paradigm that subvert the premise of Antokoletz's effort. Kaminsky argues that Antokoletz's paper and much of what passes for ethnically sensitive psychoanalytic theorizing have not yet broken with master narratives that are quintessentially assimilationist. Despite her insistence to the contrary, argues Kaminsky, Antokoletz cannot escape the barriers to thought that invisibly bind her within an assimilationist model. Kaminsky offers no easy solution, but he does point a direction.

With Kaminsky, but in a very different voice, Mario Rendon also argues against assimilationism. Still with Kaminsky, but relying on the structuralism of Levy-Strauss, Rendon also borrows from the deconstructionist arsenal and unveils how covert and ubiquitous assimilationism secretly undermines the foundations of identity. Indeed, for Rendon, disorders of ethnicity may interpenetrate with disorders of identity.

The analyst's denial of healthy ethnic strivings may foster psychopathology. Similarly, the analyst's attempt to suppress negative strivings in the patient may also foster psychopathology. Mariam Cohen explores the paradoxes of the negative therapeutic reaction, a worsening of symptoms following improvement and competent clinical work. Patients do not simply get better despite our, and their, best efforts. Applying a review of the literature in this connection to a case report, we are well served by a reminder of how therapeutic ambition is a notable disservice in certain clinical circumstances and with certain patients.

Chastened, now, with the reminder that therapeutic ambition assaults the humility so necessary to therapeutic success, we are