Patrick J. Mahony has by now become well known to psychoanalytic readers through his four books (1982), (1984), (1986), (1989) about Freud's writing. In 1984, when we established an interdisciplinary colloquium on psychoanalysis and literary criticism at the American Psychoanalytic Association, he preferred to replace "literary criticism" with "discourse." Here he explains, more convincingly, the psychoanalytic and literary reasons for this preference. Mahony claims that psychoanalysis is unique in the history of discourse in terms of a transformation of its varieties (expressive, aesthetic, rhetorical, referential). He applies careful attention and analysis of formal elements of style (expression) both to patients and to texts.