ABSTRACT
Peace always exists in relation to struggle, tension, or conflict, and acquires its meaningfulness as an emergence from, or mastery of, these painful states. The achievement of peace is such a universally desirable experience indeed, one of the core values or goals implicit in being human that identifying it as central to the psychoanalytic enterprise underlines the fact that psychoanalysis deals in similarly universal human struggles. Analytic peace is an elusive concept, as elusive as the processes through which it is attained. Almost by definition, successful psychotherapy brings with it a greater sense of peace, usually for both parties. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory has awakened us to the fact that the struggle is always indeed, must become intersubjective if the patient's struggles are to be fully engaged and addressed. It is the back and forth, dialectical movement between the subjective and the intersubjective experience of these struggles to which the analyst must attend.
