Commentary

Having feared the dryness of scholastic contention, I find instead I have been fed a feast. It is a delight to have one's thoughts considered by so eminent a group of colleagues and to find those thoughts significantly extended by their remarks. I feel both appreciation and admiration.

Viewing the broad range of orientations among our discussants, I am struck by how central to their varied responses is the same issue that arose when these ideas were presented orally around the country. The dispute regularly stirred was which idea should take priority, the primacy of the individual or that of the group context out of which the individual takes shape. Which comes first?

Our discussants represent, and represent well, the opposing sides in this debate. Marcia Cavell, impatient with my view of intersubjectivity, properly points out that everyone is inevitably a unique individual. Emanuel Berman and Edgar Levenson, by contrast, seem impatient with my one-person view of the patient: they point out with equal correctness that everything occurring in an analysis comes to life and unfolds only within an interpersonal field. I trust that readers are not surprised to find me agreeing with both positions. Whatever my success, my aim has been to find a way to integrate the seemingly contradictory but essentially true premises from which the two sides start. To respond to this point at length would be to repeat my paper.

Regarding the specific commentaries, brevity demands that I touch lightly on major points in each while acknowledging the existence of more subtle implications meriting greater consideration.

Jorge Ahumada, like an artist stepping back from a partial image to place it within the broad context of an entire canvas, locates witnessing within the larger panorama of psychoanalytic history, specifically in what he succinctly terms the Berlin-Budapest debate. That dispute, which started with Freud and Ferenczi, is the historical setting in which we now work to resolve our se