An essential aspect of human psychological development is the construction of principles for organizing experience. Stolorow and co-workers view transference as the expression of the way patients unconsciously organize their experience of the analyst in light of their early history. Patients wish the analyst to provide selfobject experiences that were absent or inadequate in early life. They expect and fear that they will repeat with the analyst early experiences of developmental failure. Psychoanalytic interpretations must be informed by the analyst's sustained empathic inquiry into this subjective world of the patient. While effective interpretations invariably provide patients with an experience of being understood, this phenomenon in turn has specific transference meaning for each patient. This meaning of the psychoanalytic investigative and interpretive activity is the principal source of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.