Steven Stern has raised the important issue of the growing dissociation between the long ago agreed definitions of psychoanalysis and its derived psychoanalytic psychotherapies, and the real changes that have taken place over the past half century in our understandings of the nature of psychoanalysis and of the techniques of its clinical application. I review how the original definitions were established, and the many changes in theory and in practice that have taken place since, and agree with Stern's description of our current dilemma. I offer, however, a different approach to the creation of a contemporary definition more congruent with where we are today as a discipline and a profession.