Epilogue

NOTHING EVER REMAINS THE SAME because everything is suspended in time. Our world is ever changing, as well as our perceptions, our insights, and our understandings. The papers in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry attest to this truth. In this issue Bachrach tells us that the bedrock of psychoanalysis is its methodology. He refers to Rapaport's statement that what makes the analyst–analysand relationship specifically psychoanalytic is that it aims to carry communication to its “last consequences”—where the person who handles the relationship takes responsibility for eliminating “any and all” obstacles to communication no matter where they may lead.

Although Rapaport's description is as valid today as it was a half a century ago, our understanding of a psychoanalytic relationship is dramatically different. We have moved from an emphasis on an objective analyst, whose role it is to examine the patient's associations while more or less frustrating the patient's infantile desires, to an analyst who is immersed in the analytic field utilizing all his or her responses in promoting the progress of the analysis and the growth of the patient. The analyst is not isolated from his or her environment, culture, or gender but within the analytic situation brings these components into the elimination of “any and all” obstacles to communication no matter where they may lead.

Therefore it is impossible for the analyst in the clinical situation to be devoid of the influence of the exigencies of the external world. Reading the papers as a whole, we are shown the historical progression in psychoanalytic thinking and how this has influenced the availability of psychoanalytic patients. We see the psychoanalyst's approach to psychoanalysis; his or her optimism, ideals, and hopes are integral to the technique of the beginning of psychoanalysis. We are reminded that the analytic attitude must be directed toward helping patients with their agendas, not the psychoanalyst's. In sum we find the