Peter Fonagy highlights the therapeutic efficacy of new experience, ‘a way of being with the other’, while the author gives priority to interpretation, insight into and the working through of unconscious conflict. The recovery of the repressed memories and fantasies of childhood is now an intermediate goal of psychoanalysis, largely superseded by transference interpretation and genetic reconstruction. Transference, like symptoms, is a return of the repressed. The author believes Fonagy's theoretical and technical focus on the non-conscious, rather than the dynamic unconscious, devalues the persisting influence and pathogenic significance of the infantile unconscious.