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The nature of change in psychoanalysis and the explanation for the effectiveness of psychoanalytic interventions has been one of the perennial problems in the understanding of the psychoanalytic process. Strachey's (1934) paper stands as the classical magisterial statement of the role of interpretation as the vehicle for change in psychoanalysis. In the half-century and more since Strachey's paper, the theoretical context, in which the understanding of the psychoanalytic process is achieved, has changed radically and has undergone significant evolution.
Strachey wrote within a theoretical context dominated by the revolutionary development of the structural theory (Freud, 1923) and the work on group psychology (Freud, 1921). The implications of the structural hypothesis, and particularly Freud's early structural formulations regarding the origin and functions of the ego and superego, had only begun to find their way into technical application. But this was also the period before the appearance of Anna Freud's work on the mechanisms of defense (1936) and Hartmann's revolutionary statement of the autonomous and adaptive capacities of the ego (1939), both of which were to have far-reaching effects on the technical evolution of psychoanalysis. Strachey's paper, therefore, stands at the head of an important