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MY ESTEEMED UNCLE, SAM LEVENSON (whom some of you older folks may remember as a TV folk humorist and author), used to say about his family that there were seven brothers and one sister and not one looked the slightest bit like any other—but they all looked like Papa! Much the same situation exists in psychoanalysis. No matter how unrelated our metaphysical and clinical positions appear to be; there is, nevertheless, an uneasy persistent family resemblance. We are all psychoanalysts.
The inference is that we must be doing something in common, tapping into some cognitive process in the patient. In Khan's felicitous phrase, we are all the servants of the patient's process (Khan, 1969). The problem is that we have great difficulty saying what it is we do when we do what we do. This is really not so unique to our field. The gap between what we can do and what we can say about it is universal. In this century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made this point quite forcefully, and for that matter, so did