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August 13, 2003. I appreciate the opportunity for a brief reply to Joseph Schachter's rebuttal of some of the comments I offered in my review of his book. He lists five points in his rebuttal. Because I do not strongly disagree with points 2 through 5, I will limit my remarks mainly to his first point.
When I stated that I was not clear what Schachter meant by stating that a focus on the here-and-now transference “may throw light, by extrapolation into the past, on the meaning of earlier experiences, including those of childhood, rather than the other way around, “I italicized the last phrase because I thought that Schachter was making a spurious distinction between interpreting the past in terms of the present and interpreting the present in terms of the past. In other words, the here-and-now transference, or the “patient-analyst interaction,” as Schachter prefers to call it, can be used to try to shed light on the past, as Schachter notes, but an understanding of past interactions with significant figures can also shed light on present relationships. I see no contradiction in working from both directions in promoting the patient's sense of personal history, nor am I aware of any evidence that consistently starting from the present produces superior therapeutic results. Further, it is difficult for me to see that one or the other preference in clinical technique requires a radical revision of the theory of transference. I assume that most analysts regularly work from both directions in linking the present and the past. In arriving at a so-called reconstruction, for example, we generally start from a dynamic theme that emerges in the present analytic interaction and work backward to infer its developmental origins. But we also sometimes start from
accounts of early memories and fantasies to make inferences about the dynamics of current conflicts. In fact, the clinical example Schachter presents on pages 178-79 fits this approach and appears to contradict his claim