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The definitions, clarifications and descriptions of the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy continue to be unclear and elusive. I believe that the problem lies, not in discovering unitary and agreed upon conceptualizations, but in accepting the notion of coexisting definitions and descriptions. An impasse has been created in the growing field of theories and psychodynamic therapy by the tendency of theorists (Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Sullivan, etc.) to imply or insist that one system or explanation of personality theory and/or therapy is the “word,” excluding other conceptualizations and formulations. On one issue however most theorists would agree: Freud's greatest discovery was that heretofore seemingly unexplainable behavior (i.e., conversion symptoms, compulsions, obsessive thoughts, etc.) was anything but capricious. These behaviors have come to be seen as symptomatic of explainable and predictable psychic and/or real events based upon the new and exciting discoveries of psychoanalysis. Subsequent developments from 1895 until the present are now history, and the evolution of our search, research and philosophical growth continues.
The impetus for the thoughts and conceptual notions in what follows has grown out of this writer's work with patients in modern psychoanalytic therapy. Much more important, however, was my own return to psychoanalysis during my middle years. It is from having had an opportunity to be both participant-observer as