ABSTRACT
Following dinner the three couples retired to the living room for coffee and conversation. All of us were mental health professionals, and as we talked the conversation got around to psychoanalysis, and the discovery that we had all been analyzed at Menningers. We began to compare notes, and found that we had each had very different experiences and perceptions of the analytic process, although it had been carefully crafted with the same philosophical foundations and technique. I offered that my analyst had never in four years acknowledged that he had seen one of my paintings. Another said his analyst hardly ever spoke, while another said he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. To our astonishment, we discovered that the most glaring variable in this presumably highly structured treatment process was the personality of the analyst.
