Some years ago now, a colleague observed during a departmental meeting that one of the skills we analysts teach, the interpretive technique essential to psychoanalysis and derivative psychotherapies, is primarily an “art.” And this opinion may not be an uncommon one: the catalogue of one long-established institute speaks, for instance, of “a gift for psychological understanding” that “cannot be taught.” In his thorough and now classic Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict, Brenner (1976) enumerates the several ways in which accomplished clinicians describe their selecting the foci of and moments for intervention, and Brenner implies that there may exist neither one single correct