The process is one of cross-validation of various aspects of the patient's characteristic or repetitive modes of integrating situations with others. The materials examined include both manifest and latent content in waking as well as in dream activities from any period of the patient's life. The interactions of patient, materials, and analyst result in the accentuating of properties common to all. The effect is a spiral, not a linear progression, with a regular return to earlier results. Psychoanalysis is like Penelope's task: each step forward offers a new hope which hangs on the of a new task. Any stage of an analysis, be it of dream or waking life, is a transitory phenomenon which is reflected in the effort of interpretation. Psychoanalytic insights provide analogies which permit a structural analysis relating impulse, thought, feeling, fantasy, myth, dream, and overt behavior. One builds schemata with intersecting axes. The dreamer dreams an erupting volcano. The analogic method substitutes for the spewing lava—semen, vituperation, vomitus, excreta. For the heat of the volcano it provides sexual passion, anger, rage in the patient. The volcano, viewed as the other, becomes mother, father, wife, lover, psychoanalyst. The epoch becomes past, present, or future. The modest psychoanalytic goal, in a transactional framework, is to establish some central certainty, a crystallized cross-validated core with uncertainty and confusion on the periphery. I believe that this is the human condition in psychoanalysis and elsewhere, and that there is no point in further ambition at any particular moment. The notion of the final solution is death-oriented whether in the mind of a Hitler or in simplistic psychoanalytic theory. If the notion of reality has any validity, the psychoanalyst is a student of reality in process. The organizing principles inherent in the individual are revealed progressively. Each stage expresses a level of organization the truth of which is relative to other stages and levels. Ideally one does not arrive at ultimate truth or structure. The choice in analysis is among the levels of refinement of the data possessed. In effect, there is no subject and no end. The unity achieved is ultimately in the mind of the patient and not in a theory. All-or-nothing explanations are an expression of impatience, nothing more. From a transactional posture, the leading hazards to correct procedure are understanding, closure, and solutions to problems. The transactional approach cannot surely encompass even simple truths. It cannot, for example, know that a cigar is a penis symbol. A particular cigar may turn out to be something else again. Freud himself took a middling position on the matter when he stated on lighting a cigar: Gentlemen, this may be the symbol of penis, but let us remember that it is also a cigar. Erich Fromm, approaching this problem from a different vantage point, suggested that it may be true that many men could agree that the sun symbolized mother, even life itself. However, to the dweller in the Sahara, it might well symbolize thirst, evil, even death. Such an approach need not deny the utility of more traditional approaches but should incorporate and supplement them. An operational or transactional approach tends to minimize error and militate against theory-based