In psychoanalytically-oriented therapy, all too often clinicians understand the patient’s dynamics (or believe they do), but are challenged to present their insights in a manner that will be both heard and made use of productively by the patient’s ego organization. In this seminar, we will use ‘snippets’ of clinical material provided by the participants to arrive at functionalist principles that maximize the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. Functionalist principles are those that both conceptualize every psychic event in terms of its internal value as a compromise formation, and that appreciate resistances as having positive psychotherapeutic value.