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IN HIS INTRODUCTION, THEODORE SHAPIRO cited Freud's long interest in language and symbol formation and his intense curiosity about how the role of language and thought supersede the need to act in the psychoanalytic situation. During the late 1950's, the linguist Noam Chomsky created a revolution in academia which spread to psychology and even to psychoanalysis. In the wake of that revolution, Victor Rosen constructed a panel on symbol formation for the American Psychoanalytic Association and formed a linguistics study group in New York, thus establishing forums of discussion between linguists and psychoanalysts. Chomsky himself was one of those who entered into the interdisciplinary dialogue at the American Psychoanalytic meeting. The changing focus from semantics and meaning to syntactics and formal structures that Chomsky espoused has since evolved to a current interest in what linguists call pragmatics, namely issues of use and intention in actual linguistic expression. This is a radical shift from formal analysis of grammar and the search for a minimal set of rules that will account for any possible sentence. There has been a parallel change between what has gone on within linguistics and what has occurred within psychoanalysis. While the last language panel at the American Psychoanalytic meeting eight years ago, run by Shapiro, discussed the rule-directed behavior involved in both linguistics and psychoanalysis, the relation of language to thought processes, and also linguistic relativity. The focus of the present panel, he stated, would be on aspects of how analysts make interpretations and how these interventions and the forms they take influence what goes on in the treatment process. "We would like to know what elements actually affect the patient—how what is said becomes efficacious