ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attempts to complement his thoughts and delineate some of the difficulties associated with the notion and the management of tact in their clinical encounters. Patients, who were first and later generation survivors of racial and political persecution, refugees, exiles, abused either as children or as adults, originating from different cultures, whose histories had produced severe trauma, either from external reality or from intrusions in their psychological development. In the post-Freudian developments, the issue of tact would be viewed from the perspective of a countertransference issue as part of the technique. As S. Ferenczi has shown the author that the analyst's narcissism is the most important impediment to being tactful, the history of analysis has produced, as the authors know, a great number of writers who have complemented Ferenczi's tenets. For Ferenczi, it was denial which was the most potent traumatic agent in the interaction between parent and child.
