In her ongoing work toward realizing a code of ethics for psychoanalytic practitioners, the author, as elsewhere, focuses on the unique nature of the work, entailing as it does the bringing to consciousness of primitive impulses, some of them destructive and even lethal. Her emphasis in this article is on the Freudian and modern analytic understanding of mental makeup and of the therapeutic process, giving particular attention to the dual-instinct theory and the relation between the therapeutic process and the needs of the society at large.