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Abstract Steven Stern has raised the important issue of the growing dissociation between the long ago agreed definitions of psychoanalysis and its derived psychoanalytic psychotherapies, and the real changes that have taken place over the past half century in our understandings of the nature of psychoanalysis and of the techniques of its clinical application. I review how the original definitions were established, and the many changes in theory and in practice that have taken place since, and agree with Stern's description of our current dilemma. I offer, however, a different approach to the creation of a contemporary definition more congruent with where we are today as a discipline and a profession. Notes The final version of this article owes thanks to a seminar discussion by Ric Almond, Terry Becker, Dianne Elise, Sam Gerson, Peter Goldberg, Erik Hesse, Mary Main, Daphne de Marneffe, Deborah Melman, Harvey Peskin, Tzipi Peskin, Steve Seligman, Judy Wallerstein, and Mitch Wilson. 1Actually, the International (IPA) has recently modified its posture in this regard. The francophone institutes (France, Belgium, French Switzerland, and French Canada) had long departed from the so-called Eitingon training model in major ways, and this had included—on theoretical as well as on practical grounds—propounding a three analytic session per week favored frequency, despite IPA strictures to the contrary. In recent action, the IPA has given full legitimacy, and equality, to three training models, the (traditional) Eitingon, the French (with its three-session-per-week norm), and the Uruguayan (a variant of the French), with each component institute expected to embrace one of these three. 2Psychobiology in the first half of the 20th century was the designation used by Adolf Meyer, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the then acknowledged dean of American psychiatry, to describe his understanding of mental illness within the context of life history and life experience, including somatic illnesses. It differed sharply from psychoanalysis in having no concepts of the unconscious or of transference. That usage is now obsolete, and today psychobiology refers to the medication-amenability, and the neurophysiological underpinnings, of mental illness. 3A personal experience of this "developmental lag" took place in a discussion group on changes in psychoanalytic theorizing experienced over the careers of the group members, in which I participated some time in the late 1970s. After many group members stated several major new trends in America—Kohut's (1971, 1977) self psychology, Mahler's (1975) developmental perspective, Schafer's (1976) "action language," and so on—Merton Gill asked if anyone in the group could indicate how their clinical work had been at all altered in the light of these conceptual advances. The first response was an embarrassed silence.