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These discussants represent three important perspectives in current psychoanalytic thinking. My Plenary in conjunction with the discussions, therefore, may serve as an introduction to a necessary debate on topics of much significance for psychoanalytic technique. While there are certain commonalties in the issues raised by the discussants, they are presented from such divergent points of view that I have chosen to respond to them individually. While I obviously disagree with some of what has been written, I appreciate the efforts of the discussants to articulate differing points of view.
Focusing on well-thought-out clinical perspectives that are recognizable to most psychoanalysts, Ted Jacobs's discussion is an important addition to the gist of my essay. In a more complete version of my views on psychoanalytic technique (Busch 1999), I spelled out how I find what Jacobs calls in his discussion the “intersubjective position” useful in the way I practice. In this piece, however, I left out the more nuanced view that Jacobs and the others he named have championed, so as to discuss the extreme versions of what is called a two-person psychology—those that deemphasize the individual mind of the patient.
First I will spotlight some comments that capture the essence of what I find additive in Jacobs's discussion. He states that “In addition to—but not as a substitute for—defense and transference analysis, understanding the analyst's subjectivity, the patient's effect on it, and its effect on the patient, opens a valuable channel to the unconscious of the patient. We utilize countertransference and the intersubjective perspective, in other words, as an added tool in our work.”