When I was a student, it was an unquestioned assumption that therapeutic change in psychoanalysis was achieved by means of the resolution of the oedipal transference neurosis. Today there are few analysts who continue to believe that this is true, as clinical experience has taught us that many patients never develop an oedipal transference neurosis or do so only in a vestigial form. It is the more fundamental psychoanalytic setting1 itself that, I believe, promotes the healing and character change that signifies a successful psychoanalytic treatment. The term psychoanalytic setting is equivalent to what Stone (1961) called the