Signifi cant as has been the role of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in contemporary culture and society, its importance continues to grow at an accelerating rate as more specifi c, focused, and involving forms of therapy are devised. The contributions of eminent practitioners that make up this volume deal with specifi c types of occurrences in the confrontation between patient and therapist, such as silence, crying, sleeping, touching, use of fi rst names, gifts, note taking, termination, etc. The views expressed here demonstrate how the rigidity of early psychoanalytic theory has yielded to fundamental changes in the handling of the analytic situation; numerous new schools of thought have arisen in attempts to give deeper fulfi llment to the needs of patient, analyst, and society. The persuasions of these new schools-Gestaltist, existentialist, neo-Freudian, behavioralist, ego psychologist, rational-emotive, encounter, and many others-underlie the material presented here.