This paper attempts to give a comprehensive picture of the concept and therapeutic functions of the real relationship in clinical psychoanalysis. After introducing this theme, the author presents an extensive review of the literature, citing not only the major recent contributors to the concept but also many contributions from the past. A third part summarizes Freud's development of the analytic relationship and then quotes from Freud's patients' written accounts of their analyses in order to illustrate how Freud's actual analytic style contained many elements of a real relationship. The fourth part presents the author's own formulation of the therapeutic contributions of the real relationship to psychoanalysis and offers a clinical vignette as an illustration of its therapeutic role in the termination phase of an analysis.