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The insufficiently recognized factors that determine therapeutic potential are first examined pragmatically. Among these are the analyst's breadth of life experience and imagination, the manner in which intercurrent events in the patient's life are handled, and the use of educational measures, encouragement, and reassurance. The psychoanalytic process is then examined from a strictly psychoanalytic viewpoint. Of crucial importance is the patient-analyst relationship and the nature of the analyst's empathic objectivity. In treating the transference neuroses, unless the analyst's own oedipal conflicts are being repeatedly mastered, true empathy with patients' unresolved conflicts cannot take place, and the analyst's interpretations, however correct as to abstract content, are not likely to reach the patients so that they can make them their own. This paradigm holds true also for the more serious narcissistic disorders and borderline states. The analyst's ability to recognize and work with disturbances originating in the preoedipal years depends on his/her awareness and mastery of his/her own problems in these depths.