What follows is a description of my loving collaboration with Joseph Lichtenberg, and how the relationship became a three-person co-authorship of seven books developing principles of treatment emanating from self psychology and motivational systems perspective. Our motivational systems books were contextualized within a psychoanalytic relational world wherein motivation was downplayed as part of general attempts to extricate psychoanalysis from drive theory. The development of motivation systems theory offers an alternative to drive theory in our current psychoanalytic relational world.