When the editor of this issue invited me to write about technique, I found myself drawn to a general consideration of the nature of technique, rather than to an overview of my own views about how to practice. This article concerns what seems to me to be the inevitability of multiple and implicit theories of technique in psychoanalysis. We are continuously in the process of formulating articulate versions of technical theories that have been implicit up to that point. Implicit technical theory is the source of all explicit technical theory. And implicit theory, in turn, is the expression of value positions that we often have not reflected on. It is our positions about what is good in life, so frequently unexamined, that underlie our theories of technique. Evaluation of technical theory requires that we identify the values that have inspired our theories, and that we then decide which of these purposes are most important to us, and which theories best accomplish them.