A Portuguese proverb, I believe, defines universality as the local thing minus the surrounding walls. Psychoanalysis, then, is a potentially good provider of universal knowledge, founded as it is on the local, even intimate endeavor. The problem is how to get rid of the surrounding walls—without destroying, that is, the whole enterprise in the process. This is the problem of how to account for and validate the psychoanalytic experience given, on the one hand, its specific traits as