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OUR MEDICAL COLLEAGUES WILL RECOGNIZE my title as coming from the Oath of the Aesclepiads.1 It has been in the consciousness of psychoanalysts since the inception of our profession, as evidenced in our conventional wisdom such as, "The patient leads—the analyst follows"; elegant phrases about letting ourselves become "… servant(s) of a (the patient's) process, " and, since the 1950s, our valid preoccupation with the impact of countertransference. I don't mean harm in any willful, malicious way, nor in terms of the commission of certain types of errors, those imaginative wanderings and innovations attributable to a pioneering spirit.
No, I mean harm due to our narrow, arrogant unwillingness to be puzzled or to wonder—a not wondering based on a propensity toward the sloth of certainty; or an impelling to apply learning from books, instead of our seeking out the inherent wisdom embedded in a patient's need for safety and survival, and his unspoken sensitivity to our participation, our impact. But more about that later.
This is the last issue of this Journal for which I will be responsible as senior editor. For the past twenty-five years I have tried to steer its publication between the idea that we know the entire truth about the most important things, and the contradictory notion