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MUCH HISTORICAL RESEARCH IS required now for developing a fuller knowledge of the current psychoanalytic situation of the 1980s, as it both derives and differs from that of the 1930s. Almost half a century has already passed and we are, culturally speaking, light years away from a uniform, unqualified, and unquestioning belief in the necessary determinism of biology or the relational conditioning of sociology. Neither "environment" of the psyche is absolute. Such a research effort will, therefore, essentially be philosophical in content and reconstructive in scope. Of special interest are two questions. First, from within the standpoint of the ego-interpersonal perspectives, where do such environmentalist psychoanalysts as Sullivan and Hartmann, among others, find the logical and empirical grounds even to create their personal perspectives, let alone account for the uniquely individual, selfic resources from which they derive their own distinctly innovative directions? That of course, is a perspectival question concerning the overall construction of their special points of view. The second question concerns the clinical interaction. Does their systematic exclusion of the patient's uniquely individual, first-personal processes from the structure of psychoanalytic inquiry, in practical terms, also extend the psychoanalyst's authority unilaterally, and reinforce it for managing the procedures and for selecting the goals of the therapeutic inquiry? In other words: Does this exclusion of their own and their patient's immediate experience of first-personal processes mainly appeal to psychoanalysts who believe that it is they, of themselves, who control the conditions under which their patients appear to change? I shall not, of course, attempt to develop the clinical and