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May 2, 2000. Sometimes a typographical error illuminates a theoretical point. In my recent article, “Countertransference, Conflictual Listening, and the Analytic Object Relationship” (JAPA 48/1, p. 109), the following should have appeared:
A patient says he is angry at his male lover. He is not there and should be. If I catch the patient's loneliness, I may speak to it. I know that feeling. I might say, “You feel so lost without him,” and I could be speaking to myself as well.
I am making the point here that I have not really “found” the patient but rather some mix of him and me. Because the analyst's picture of the patient is always a blend of the patient and the analyst, interpretations sometimes feel to the analyst as if they could be directed to both parties in the relationship.
It has been brought to my attention that because, in the published version, the closing quotation marks are inadvertently omitted from my comment to the patient, the sentence reads as if I might have said to the patient, “You feel so lost without him, and I could be speaking to myself as well”; in other words, the second clause becomes a self-disclosure, rather than a comment to the reader, as it is in the corrected version above. If this passage is read as a self-disclosure, it casts an entirely different light on the discussion that follows it, not one that I intended.
While the boundaries between patient and analyst are always blurred, whether or not one chooses to make this explicit to the patient remains a matter of personal choice. For myself, I would do so only under special circumstances. What I am trying to describe here is an effort to preserve the external boundary between analyst and patient in order precisely to allow the analyst's internal loss of boundaries to flourish and fuel the work.
I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify this point.