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Tbegin this review of Sroufe, et al. (2005) with some thoughts about theory building and clinical process. In the early 1960s, author Ernest Hemingway was reportedly asked by a magazine interviewer if he could name an essential ingredient in becoming a great writer. Hemingway replied, “Yes, there is. In order to become a great writer a person must have a built-in, shock-proof crap detector” (Postman and Weingarten, 1985). Psychoanalysts face similar problems. As in literature where sorting out the “wheat” of artful representation from the “chaff” of cliché is a perpetual struggle, the psychoanalytic enterprise constantly requires that we leave the firm terrain of material, verifiable facts and venture into the wilderness of interacting subjectivities guided by mental schemas, theories, and developmental narratives. We hope that our understanding of subjectivities will help us do our work and help us sort out or through the patient's life experience. Then again we often discover that our “understanding” of the patient was wrong or overly simplistic or, sadly, just our own clever invention. That's when our crap detector goes off.