This paper is a contribution to a special section in honor of Fred Pine. After briefly describing my personal relationship with Fred, I discuss some issues in which our perspectives converge. These issues include the pluralism of different psychoanalytic schools, the possibility of a unified psychoanalytic theory, the use of experience-near interpretation, and the importance of subjective experience. I then summarize a proposal for a revamping of some fundamental concepts and formulations of classical theory, including the concepts of unconscious mental contents and the dynamic unconscious, in order to render them more faithful to lived experience.