IN PRESENTING THESE NOTES, I should first set aside any impression that the effort is "partisan," i.e., intended to derogate the role of interpretation in analytic work. I do indeed believe interpretation to be the essential and distinctive technical activity of the analyst's functional role. As to whether it operates effectively without certain prior and continuing activities, attitudes, and contextual conditions, one may say flatly, "No!" As to whether it is, in every particular instance, the decisive analytic element—this may be open to reflection, discussion, possibly to debate. While I shall avoid significant incursions into the intellectual territory of interpretation as such, it is evident that I can not avoid occasional references to the roles of interpretation and insight in the globally viewed psychoanalytic process and situation.

First, the general auspices of the psychoanalytic undertaking. The patient comes to the analyst for help with suffering. Whether he be a physician or lay analyst, the analyst is, in the