We are often assured by those who should know best that sacramental confession and psychological analysis are very much the same thing. On this point at least there would seem to be a considerable measure of agreement between many Catholic spokesmen and many psychologists: if they differ it is only in the assertion of the superiority of their own respective wares. While the psychologists will tell us that sacramental confession is a sort of naïve and undeveloped, pre-scientitic forerunner of a psychological analysis, it has become almost a commonplace among many Catholic apologists that analysis is a secularised anil truncated form of sacramental confession.