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With three brief clinical examples, the author supports the thesis that the arbitrary nosology of 'supportive' and 'insight' therapies should be dropped, mainly because single interpretations can be supportive in high anxiety situations
where reassurance, direction, or environmental manipulation cannot. A fifty-five-year-old widow with an agitated depression was helped to enter into fruitful long term therapy with an interpretation of masturbatory wishes expressed in a dream. A borderline graduate student, in therapy only briefly, immediately resolved an acute panic state with an interpretation of his passive feminine wishes as a defense against succeeding (passing an exam) and thus killing his therapist. A thirty-five-year-old married woman, previously in brief therapy, returned two years later with a paranoid delusion which masked a folie á deux with her psychotic sister, itself a defense against separation from her. Interpretation allowed for a completely realistic resolution with appropriate commitment for the sister as well as for a favorable marital readjustment.