Reply to Doris Walsey Shay

Dr. Shay's discussion of “Why do (don't) you ask?” demonstrates that something is missing in various dialogues under consideration here. With admirable analytic sensitivity, Shay heard Don communicating his experience of me as one who provides or withholds love, but Don's “powerful yearnings” for an affectionate relationship were not a focal concern for me until he said, “Don't let me be lonely.” Every analyst's narcissism must face the same challenges as the analysand's; nobody is entitled to claim undisputed possession of “the truth.” Inasmuch as I, as Don's analyst and author of the original paper, might have wanted to think of myself as in control of the material which I present, Shay shows what a weak position that is. It is indeed important for me to reflect on whether I, as Shay says, “dispelled a magical moment” and “enacted how women function in Don's life.”

Anyone well versed in classical drive theory, ego psychology, object relations theory, self psychology, or Lacanian theory might expand what I said about Don's communication in a plethora of creative ways. It is precisely because analysts can read any given set of communications in more than one way that we have so many voices in the psychoanalytic dialogue of our time. One theme of my presentation is to downplay the authority of any singular, even any specific though multileveled interpretation of narrative content. According to Lacan, the “lack” of mastery through “knowledge” is an inevitable and necessary element in dialogue about human experience. One may take as a first approximation of Lacan's “revision” of theory that no particular “interpretation” (i.e., translation of self-expression into a new narrative formula) is privileged to claim superiority over all others.

Shay objected that an analyst functioning as I did “narrows and constricts the field of curiosity. What then follows is the fine tuning of an analysand resonating to focusing on the issue that [the analyst] finds interesting.” Virtually