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Therese Benedek died in 1977. When I began my training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in the Child Therapy Program in 1978, she had legendary status. The stories about her revolved around her formidable intuition, her idiosyncratic style, and her independence of mind. Many people repeated what I consider a paradigmatic anecdote about her. As she grew older, she became increasingly hard of hearing, but her patients marveled that she didn't even need to hear what they said in order for her to understand them; she had an intuitive, magical capacity to know how they felt without having to hear the actual words. Later, I was introduced to her work by reading her seminal article “Parenthood as a Developmental Phase” and came to appreciate the originality and the scope of her thinking.
In the course of researching Benedek, an analyst colleague of hers told me the following story, but qualified it as probably apocryphal. A patient in analysis with Benedek when she was old and hard of hearing carried on, wondering what he would do when she died, worrying how he could possibly manage without her. Finally Benedek spoke up, “You … you're so worried about you when I die, what about me?” When I repeated this story to a colleague who had offered to put me in touch with a friend who had been in analysis with Benedek, she laughed and said, “That's not an apocryphal story, that was my friend!”
The voice of the analyst asking “what about me?” is the voice I will explore. With this question, Benedek reminded her patient and us of the presence of the analyst in the therapeutic dyad. I will argue that Benedek's question represents an attitude and way of thinking that we now refer to as relational or intersubjective, signifying a two-person psychology. Benedek referred to it as transactional or reciprocal, and it was embedded in her work from the beginning of her career as an analyst in 1921 to its end with her plaintive remark. Much of her writing attempts to describe the impact of in