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M y interest in the topic of revenge and my subsequent two-year, virtually full-time immersion in writing this essay had their conscious origin in the reading of Laura Blumenfeld's memoir, Revenge: A Story of Hope (2002). That more than intellectual curiosity was driving my exploration would not become clear to me until the essay's near completion.In her book Blumenfeld describes a train of events that began when her father, then a rabbi visiting in Israel, was shot during the Intifada by a Palestinian gunman.The wound was superficial; he was briefly treated in the local emergency room and sent home. Upon his return to the United States, he swiftly recovered from both the physical and the psychological effects of the trauma and regained his psychic balance, as did his son and his ex-wife. Not so his daughter Laura, a journalist with the Washington Post, who tenaciously brooded, obsessed, dreamt, wrote, and talked about the event over a ten-year-period-all with a nagging, persistent, yet righteously ego-syntonic affective experience that congealed around a structured pattern of fantasied revenge in which she would confront her father's assailant and demand his admission of guilt and his apology, along with his acknowledgment that, in her words, "you don't fuck with the Blumenfelds."Eventually she goes to Israel, where, using her journalistic credentials and connections, she gains access first to the family of the gunman, by then imprisoned, and later to the man himself. At first Blumenfeld uses only her f irst name and identif ies herself only as an American reporter wishing to learn and write about the Intifada. j a p aTraining and Supervising Analyst, Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute.

The gradually unfolding nature of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process looked at from one highly restricted point of view can be understood as the inexorable disclosure by the patient of secrets; secrets he keeps from himself as well as from others by means of the complex, intricate, and hidden methods whose understanding forms the stock in trade of the psychotherapist. Research into the processes and outcomes of psychotherapy or into any other natural or artificial phenomena, can also be looked at as a struggle on the part of the researcher to find ways which make it possible for the objects of his research to disclose their secrets. Just as the psychotherapist harbors within himself secret thoughts and feelings with regard to his patient, his relationship to the patient, and the process they are engaging in, all of which are traditionally viewed under the heading of countertransference, so the researcher keeps hidden, both from himself and his scientificThe work of the Psychotherapy Project of The Menninger Foundation has been generously supported, initially by the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry, and subsequently by the Ford Foundation.This report represents, we feel, a closer than usual collaboration. Our ideas are the product of truly mutual participation in a shared effort.M e wish to acknowledge the assistance of

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