When the patient's resistances find support in the general social climate, serious obstacles are raised to the success of the analysis. Shallow object relations, sexual promiscuity, drug addiction, and radical confrontation are all common in today's society and are frequently utilized by patients as rationalizations for the acting out of unconscious conflict. The author cautions about the therapeutic limitations in these cases; he suggests systematic questioning of all rationalizations, socially sanctioned regressions, and prejudices without, however, the analyst intruding his own value system into the analytic relationship.