What seems at first to be a humanistic trend in recent psychoanalytic thinking may actually be the culmination of a holistic movement that began soon after Freud. As theory, it carries with it many built-in difficulties and requires implicit support from the partializing parent theory. In the shadow of that older theory, however, it makes a number of important contributions, including attention to meaning as made, not just discovered, and the importance of the analyst's attitudes in treatment.