This paper was stimulated by the recent paper by Charlotte Wynn Parry and Diana Birkett (1996) in which the authors suggest that the idea of the working alliance has dropped out of analytic discourse and they suggest that it be brought back. In this paper I suggest that, rather than having dropped out, the idea of the working alliance has some inherent difficulties and also that it arises in relation to a particular view of the mind and mental functioning and correspondingly of the nature of the therapeutic process. Since we do not always distinguish clearly enough between these different models there is room for confusion. This paper does not aim to resolve confusion but to make some suggestions about why some of the confusions arise in the first place.