Clinical psychoanalysts form their analytic identity primarily in the context of transferences to other practitioners—their analyst, supervisors and teachers—and secondarily through their assimilation of the writings of Freud and others. For students of applied analysis and historians of psychoanalysis, the order of importance is reversed, and psychoanalytic writers become their principal reference points. Nevertheless, transference to theory is inevitable for both clinicians and scholars, and the personal relationship to practitioners and theorists is crucial.