About two years ago, we, as members of the Call for Papers Committee for the 2002 National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis Conference, took up the question of how to introduce a paper format that would go beyond the analysis of a clinical problem or population through an established conceptual lens. We sought to highlight the writer's creativity and subjectivity, and thereby free her/him from the tyranny of academic citation and boundedness to theoretical preferences. Believing that evocative ideas, just like good interpretations or good art, generate from the heart, from the raw interior of our felt sense of things, we wanted to create a space in the conference for our psychoanalytic social work colleagues to write from the standpoint of their own personal reflections (while leaving the content field wide open). We wanted to