Our heritage from Freud's early clinical experiences includes a set of guidelines to minimize the patient's awareness of the analyst as a person. The hope was to ensure the full unfolding of the patient's conflictual struggles and their historical referents, uncompromised by new, external contaminants. If we give patients nothing to go on, the reasoning went, their productions will be a more pure reflection of their internal worlds. Drawing on Freud's technical recommendations (and not on his manner of working as reflected in his case studies, [cf. Lipton, 1977]), there developed in the literature an “orthodox,” “neutral” style, characterized by an impassively formal, largely silent analyst. As the patient exposed his or her personal experiences, this analyst listened, interrupting only with sparse or emotionally detached interpretations. (This interpretation of analytic “neutrality” differed from the derivation of the concept within classical ego